


NaFicWriMo

by Polly_Lynn



Category: Castle
Genre: Angst, BFFs, Babysitting, Captain America: The First Avenger, Characters Kids, Crushes, Engagement, Exes, F/M, Family, Father-Daughter Relationship, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Gen, Gifts, Halloween, Holidays, Humor, Injury Recovery, Jealousy, Kids, Marriage Proposal, Married Couple, Movie Night, Old Peggy Carter, Past Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Romance, Schmoop, Steve Rogers Feels, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-01
Updated: 2017-11-30
Packaged: 2019-01-28 08:23:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 30
Words: 42,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12602400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polly_Lynn/pseuds/Polly_Lynn
Summary: One work a day (hopefully) for the month of November 2017





	1. All Saints

**Author's Note:**

> Some of these may be short; others may be related to some of my other work. But I hope to put something up for the whole month.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Sorry. Castle. Sorry. Tired.” The words gets swallowed up. Devoured by a yawn. "Tired," she tries again, frowning. "But the pumpkins are on fire.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Future Fic. First of what I hope will be 30 in NaFicWriMo. Maybe Halloween 2018?

_Kate_

His voice is low. It’s more a stirring of air than even a whisper. Warm breath that ruffles the hair on the back of her neck. 

_Kate_

There's a hand now. A palm skimming her shoulder and fingers not quite tugging at the neckline of her shirt. His voice notching up, probably because she's not moving. Can't move. 

"Beckett." That's not a whisper. That's definitely a tug. "Kate." 

"Mmm'up." She swats at the invading palm. At the gliding fingers and the insistent sound of his voice. "'m _up,_ Castle." 

“Not up.” He sounds a little smug now. A little amused from somewhere way up high. “You’re about as not up as you can be and still be in the house.” 

She tries to roll to her side, but there’s something. _Something._ The leg of the couch, and she’s tangled. Sleeping bag. The floor. She remembers, kind of, and she hates that he’s right. Hates that he’s not helping her up. 

She wills her eyes open. Hisses and squints at the . . . at the _thing._ "Light. Too light. Too much." 

"Light?" He sounds confused. 

 _Stupid,_ she thinks. _He’s stupid._   But he’s not, and she feels bad for thinking it. 

“Sorry. Castle. Sorry. Tired.” The words gets swallowed up. Devoured by a yawn. "Tired," she tries again, frowning. "But the pumpkins are on fire." 

“Pumpkins,” he repeats. _Stupidly repeats_ , but then he gets it. He leans or stretches or moves or something impossible and the shadow he casts is sheer relief, even with her eyes closed. “Pumpkins off fire.” 

He huffs out an exaggerated breath. It makes her laugh. The dumb joke and the way he plays it up. 

 _Stupid_ , she thinks again, but her eyes flutter open now. It’s a pleasant little picture he makes. Upside down and looming with his too-long hair flopping forward. With wisps of smoke rising on the scent of candle wax behind him.  She reaches up. A Herculean effort, but his cheeks are late-night rough and she wants to feel the stubble snag in the whorls of her fingerprints. 

“Whoa! Hey . . .” He catches her wrist. Stops her fingers short of her goal and doesn’t even _notice_ the glare she’s fixing him with. Doesn’t even _notice_ his life’s in danger, because he’s frowning at her hand. “Beckett, you’re filthy.”

“Filth . . . I am _not_.” She tries to tug her hand back, but he holds fast, and she’s suddenly half sitting up. Dizzy and half in his lap as he laughs and drops to his knees to catch her. 

“Filthy.” He sounds delighted as he manhandles her. His palm skims inside the _vee_ of her shirt. “Skittle. No surprise there,” he mutters. His fingers move on. There’s a sticky, slightly nauseating sound as he peels something away from the dip behind her collar bone. “Bulls-eye? You don’t even _like_ those.” 

“ _You_ do. Your daughter does.” 

She tries to swat his hands away. Tries to scrub at her skin, but he’s too quick. 

“Ah–ah . . .” He brings her palm up a quarter-inch from her nose. “Chocolate here.” He dips his head. His tongue darts out and the dark smear disappears. “There might be more.” 

He leers suggestively down her top. He waggles his eyebrows and comes for her. It’s ridiculous and gross and she’s shivering. She’s _seriously_ entertaining it, but the half melted bulls-eye catches her eye. The wet, weeping Skittle in all its violent-green glory that he’s set off to the side in  bowl that’s half-filled with a truly alarming number of candy wrappers. 

“She went down?” She nods toward the bowl. “Even with all that?”

“She went down,” he says, like it’s nothing. “After the million doorbells she got to ring with you? And carrying all that loot? Oh, she went _down_.” 

He’s brushing past it,  but it can’t have been easy. Lily had been _so_ amped. So proud of her Rosie the Riveter coveralls and her big girl boots. She’d been so _conniving_ about the damned candy, and it must have taken him a million years to get her down. 

“God, she’s cute.” Kate groans, despairing. She pictures the chubby hand clutching the black strap of an enormous plastic pumpkin. The lusty shout of _Trick or Treat_ and nearly perfect diction, courtesy of Martha.  “We don’t have a chance.” 

“Never did,” he says cheerfully. “Not for a second.” He pushes and pulls at her body, ducking her hands and dancing the two of them  to their feet. “Let’s get you cleaned up, shall we?” 

“You, too.” She launches herself at him. She presses her sticky, rainbow-stained hands to his jaw and nuzzles his neck. She laughs into the wall of his chest. “Get _you_ cleaned up, too.” 

“ _Yech._ ” He makes a face as her fingers snag in his hair. “I guess . . . me too.” 

She grabs _his_ wrist, this time. She darts for the bedroom, tugging him along, then whirls to face him. Stops dead and fixes it so he crashes into her. “Happy Halloween, Castle.” 

“Happy day _after_ ,” he says, slipping her watch from her wrist. “Happy 364 days to plan.” 

She kisses him for that. Properly kisses him, sipping at the undiluted joy he finds in this. Finds in everything and shares with her. Shares with their daughter. 

“All Saints,” she murmurs, remembering it from somewhere.

He pulls back, smiling at it. Satisfied as he kisses her, too. “All Saints.”  

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading.


	2. Caveat Donator

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The dress is perfect. The color. The corset-back, and the curve-hugging silhouette. It's beyond perfect.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Insert for “Home is Where the Heart Stops” (1 x 08). Second of hopefully 30 for NaFicWriMo. Thanks to Cora Clavia for the Latin translation services. 

 

 

The dress is perfect. The color. The corset-back, and the curve-hugging silhouette. It's _beyond_ perfect.

He’s pleased with himself. So _very_ pleased that it’s hardly even a chore, dodging foot traffic with the huge, flat box in tow. With the sleek, silk-handled bag looped around his wrist and bumping against his middle, he hardly even minds the occasional dirty look when someone catches a sharp corner in the shoulder. When he bowls into an intersection at the tail end of a light, and a car horn rattles his ear drum. He hardly even minds. 

It’s not just the dress. It’s not just the other thing. _Things._ The sleek bag that makes his heart pound a little more than he’d _ever_ admit, because what is he, twelve? It’s not just that, because he knows where she lives now. 

It’s quite a coup. Something else to be pleased with, the way he got it out of Ryan without the poor, innocent sap even realizing it, and now he knows where she lives. He’s on his way with the perfect dress and then some, and it’s definitely this round to him. 

_Definitely._

He pulls up short in front of the building. He stops cold, and the box almost overbalances. The box almost goes tumbling. He bobbles it. Smacks himself in the face with the sleek, silk-handled bag, but recovers. He kind of recovers, but he’s outside her _place_. Right outside where she lives.  

It surprises him. It’s a nice building. Kind of nice. There’s sleazy pink neon in a ground-floor window, and it all just kind of . . .  surprises him. 

And it’s older. Not run down, but the kind of place that gets “character” in sarcastic quote marks in a listing. The kind of place that makes him wonder if she sleeps with a wrench by the bed in case she needs to beat some dinosaur of a radiator into submission in the middle of the night. The kind of place that makes him want to nose around inside, though he might want that anyway. If she lived in some recently “flipped’ monstrosity or a cookie-cutter duplex. In a hovel or an igloo or a yurt, he just might want to nose around inside. 

“Can I get that for you?” 

The voice jolts him out of his reverie, and the box tries again to make a break for it. There’s a young woman between him and the vestibule door. She’s shy. She flutters her hands, unsure whether to approach or to back away. 

“The door,” she explains. “You’ve got your hands full.” 

She blushes hard enough he can tell even in the wash of the streetlight. A shy, pretty thing in a coat buttoned up to her chin. 

A wave of something awkward sweeps through him. Something confused and he almost blurts out a warning. He almost asks her what she thinks she’s doing, offering to get the door for some stranger with a box. 

Almost, but he thinks about the dress . . . 

“That would be _great._ ” 

He smiles, telling himself it’s harmless when she blushes harder. When she blinks hugely in the light and scurries for the stairs, calling “Have a good night,” over her shoulder, he tells himself he’s all good intention, but the damage is done. 

The elevator doors roll open on her floor, and he’s beset by nerves. By second thoughts and third ones. Beset by the wholly unfamiliar idea that maybe this isn’t a good idea. 

But the shitty hall light catches the silver glint of paper and it reminds him of the dress. Of crystals catching the light and that _color._ It reminds him that it’s perfect, and he’s suddenly annoyed at the way the feeling that carried him here has slipped away. He’s angry at the sudden dissolution of that fizzing excitement. That smug pleasure at getting one over on Ryan and the delighted, absolute conviction that the dress is perfect and everything is perfect. 

He’s suddenly _angry,_ and it carries him all the way to her door. It brings his thumb down hard on the buzzer. 

“ _Castle?_ ” 

The door opens and closes behind her before his jaw can drop. Before he can even register that he’s shocked. Beyond shocked, and she’s advancing on him. She’s backing him right up into the opposite wall. 

“ _Lanie?_ ” He holds on to the box for dear life. Winces as the sharp corner of the frame hanging behind him swings to jab him in the side. “What . . . what are you doing here?” 

“ _Trying_ to save Beckett from herself,” she says absently. Her eyes narrow and fix on the box. “Oh, tell me that’s a dress.” 

“It’s a dress,” he blurts, wondering if he might have said the same whatever it was.  

“A good one?” She folds her arms. 

“Red. Silk. With like . . . crystals.” He gestures awkwardly at his own chest. “And it laces up the back. But not, like . . . It’s _nice_.” He feels his chin jutting out, and apparently he _is_ twelve. “A good one.” 

“Praise the Lord and pass the formal wear.” 

She holds out her hands, palms up. He stares at them. Stares at _her_ and tries to figure out what the hell is going on. 

“Castle.  It’s getting late, and Girlfriend’s still in her towel in there.” Her eyebrow shoots up, daring him to comment on that. Daring him to even entertain the image. “Now would be good.” 

“But I . . .” he stammers. His eyes dart wildly from Lanie to the door and back again. 

“Y _ou . ._ were never here. You feel me?” She takes the box from him, finally. Plucks it right out of his arms with the greatest of ease. “ _You_ had whatever million-dollar boutique send some little shop girl right over with this, and oh, look! There’s a card, because you did _not_ go behind Beckett’s back to find out where she lives, and you _definitely_ didn’t think you were gonna knock on her door and find her in some short, silky little robe . . . “ 

“You said a towel,” he says, because he has to say _something_. Because she’s bossy and mean and this isn’t how this was supposed to go. 

“I said towel. What you saw in the head of yours? That’s a whole other thing.” She’s turning away from him now. She’s nearly through the door. He’s dismissed. She’s _dismissed_ him. 

“I have . . .” 

He lifts the bag. He rattles it in her direction and knows it’s the wrong thing before her glare even lands. He knows suddenly and absolutely it’s the wrong thing, but he’s frozen. He’s stuck behind its sleek black lines and profusion of tissue paper. 

“Oh, you take that slutty underwear with you, Writer Boy.” 

“It’s not!” he protests. His spine stiffens. His chest puffs out. He makes a stand for half a second, then wilts against the stupid ugly picture. “It’s not slutty.” 

She turns all the way around, then. She smooths her hand over the box resting in the crook of her arm. She studies the play of light on silver _._

“Might not be,” she says. She sounds surprised. Impressed maybe. “Might not be. So you go ahead and hold on to it. And the next time something this stupid gets into your head?” She fixes him with a shrewd gaze. Holds it for a long moment. “You hold on to it a little more. Now get out of here,” she says over her shoulder. “Go get ready.”  

The door closes. The security chain slides for good measure. He wraps his fist tight around the black silk handles and goes. He has to get ready.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two down, twenty-eight to go . . .


	3. Glyphic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “It's an odd detail to fixate on. Odd to fixate on any one thing. Everything moves fast all of a sudden. Everything, and it’s all big. It’s all life and death.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Starts during Veritas (6 x 22), then Future Fic. Number 3 of, hopefully, 30.

 

It's an odd detail to fixate on. Odd to fixate on any one thing. Everything moves fast all of a sudden. Everything, and it’s all big. It’s all life and death. 

She's no longer a fugitive. _They_ are no longer fugitives, though the world hasn't quite caught up to that yet. Their photos flash on the flat screens all around the bullpen. Their last-knowns and a phone number and all that. Details that would thrill him in the abstract, but every one is a shock to the system right now. 

He wants it over. _This_ -with-a-capital- _T_ over for all time, even though he knows it's not an accident that the two of them are still top-of-the-hour and breaking news. It's _not_ just that the world hasn't caught up. It's a strategy, because Bracken can't know it's come unraveled. The plot to take Beckett out. He can't know until they're actually slapping the cuffs on him, and even then . .  . 

_They_

_Him_  

He's hardly sure who's who any more. It's bewildering. Maybe that's why he's fixated. Why this odd little detail has captured his attention. It's an anchor. A strange one. Macabre, really, but it's something to latch on to, and anyway, he can't stop thinking about it

"Castle." 

Her voice is low. She drops down next to him, so he must be sitting. He's sitting, and pretty much no one else is. She's not. Wasn't. Is now, and she's chafing his fingers in her own like she's worried about him. _She's_ worried about _him._ He has to keep it together. 

He has to _get_ it together, but the slip of time works against him. 

He suddenly remembers the smear of blood on the filthy hallway wall. He remembers her slight, boneless weight in his arms. How terrified he was, knowing that he shouldn't let her sleep. Driving and driving, even still, with her slumped and unmoving against the car door, because what else could he do?

"Kate." He snaps back into himself. He catches up with the world. The here and now, and even then, he can't stop thinking about it—picturing this _thing_ his mind keeps snagging on—even though she needs him. ”Kate, are you ok?"

"I'm fi—" She stops herself. Takes a slow, deliberate breath that he loves her for, and tells him the truth. "I'm ok. Considering." She gives him a small smile, wan and worried. "Are you?" 

"Me? Yeah." He squeezes her hands. "Coming down a little, I think. Adrenaline." 

She nods. He feels her hands trembling in his. He turns them palm up, as though he'll find the weight of the world there. The weight of a decade and a half, and it almost spills out. The odd little detail like an offering, but something makes him swallow it down. 

 _Something_  

"What now?" he asks instead, trying to sound ready for anything. 

He's not ready for anything. Unless "anything" is tucking her under his arm and running away to somewhere quiet and Canadian, because strangely enough, the on-the-lam plan still sounds pretty good off-the-lam. Canada and letting someone else shoulder the load sounds positively ideal. 

"They're moving soon." 

She says it like she's sorry, and he has another rubber-band moment. An unpleasant, elastic sensation that leaves his mind laboring to figure out who she means. If _her_ they is _his_ they. IA. Gates. Whoever's the next level up, because— _holy shit_ —they have him, and this is all _so_ not in Kansas anymore. 

 _That_ they

 _That_ him

"Moving. DC," he says, his stomach sinking as she nods. Canada is the other way, his brain informs him miserably. "They're letting you go?"

" _We're_ letting _them_ tag along." 

She stands, transforming with it.  She's tall and fierce and wonderful, and he's as in awe of her then as he was all those years ago. He takes her hand and hauls himself to his feet, and he's with her. He's _so_ with her, except for one tiny corner of his mind. One tiny corner that can't stop thinking about it. 

The tiny cassette, so unstuck in time, its clear plastic clouded in one corner. He sees it vividly in his mind. More vividly than he could have really, literally seen it those few chaotic minutes. In the tense, endless thereafter before they all finally crowded around the equipment. 

He _sees_ it. Loops and whorls and creases. Her mother's fingerprint. 

He's fixated. 

 

* * *

 

There are echoes he doesn't like in how it goes down. There's ground he's far from eager to  re-tread, but things move fast and slow and fast again, and he'll never have another chance. 

They're in DC. 

They're back in New York. 

There are hearings and depositions. Formalities and things that matter. The whole of the case moves at speed away from him—from them—and it's a blessed relief, except for one thing. Except for the fact that he'll never have another chance if he doesn't move now. 

So he corners Esposito. 

He's nervous. His mouth tastes sour, and it's hard to bring himself to say it. It's hard to do this again and not feel a cloud hanging over it. But he tells himself they wouldn't be here if he hadn't made the choice back then. If Esposito hadn't. He wouldn't be him, and she wouldn't be her, and even the romantic in him—even the part of him that believes truly, madly, deeply in soul mates—can't see a path to _them_ that doesn't start in that cage, under that bare bulb with a tattered file folder and a threat. 

"The tape," he finally manages. "The cassette. Is it gone?"

"Nothing's gone yet." Esposito sounds equal parts smug and annoyed, and well he might. 

There's an interview room piled high with boxes they've all filled diligently. Meticulous documentation of every scrap of evidence. It's piled high, waiting for the Feds to take it away. But everything moves in fits and starts. Everything is hurry up and wait, then try to keep up. 

"Can I . . ." Castle's eye travels up and down the stacks. Over and across. There's some method to the madness, he's sure, but he wouldn't know where to start. "Can you . . . I need it for five minutes." 

It's a Hail Mary estimate. For all he's been thinking about this for days—for all that he's _fixated_ on it—he really has no idea how long he'll need. _What_ he'll need or what he'll even do with it. 

"You want the recording?" Esposito jerks a thumb toward his desktop. "Me and Ryan already copied everything we could.  

"Not a recording," he says, more sharply than he means to. 

"It's all good." Esposito softens minutely, misunderstanding. "Beckett brought it home, and we nailed it down. Feds want this guy almost as bad as we do."

"But the tape." He's stumbling over his own feelings. His own conviction that it's important. "It has fingerprints. It has her mother's fingerprint." 

Esposito's shoulders jerk. His spine stiffens, as though it's a body blow. "Damn."  

"Can you . . .?" Castle trails off. He sags with relief. It's not just him. It's not. "Can you help?" 

But Esposito is already moving. "Come on." 

 

* * *

 

It's a pristine lift, as professional as he could want, and there's something terrible in that. In the way black-powder lines interrupt the clear backing. 

It's no less terrible as an image, once he scans it. A virtual thing in various sizes and resolutions that he can manipulate. 

He does manipulate it anyway. He tips it this way and that. He zooms in to fill a window and drops it on to open fields. He frames it _in silico._ In shadow boxes. Within the confines of mossy, sueded matting and stark right angles in dark wood. He thinks of it in two dimensions, and it's terrible all the while. 

It's terrible until the day he's holding her hand. Until she's draped across his lap in a rare, melodramatic a moment. 

"But _why_ can't we elope?" she moans, and it's convincing. She's all-too-convincing when she's moaning. When she's draped across his lap. 

"I feel like this is a trick." He chafes the fingers of her left hand. He brings the colors of the diamond to life by candlelight under the loft's cathedral ceiling. "I seem to remember very stiff resistance to the idea of eloping." 

"Stiff," she says wickedly. She turns on her side. She plants her palm, and there's some absolutely unnecessary wriggling. "Hmmm." 

He dips his head to kiss her fingertips where they lay against his chest. The beauty of the scene dazzles him. The grace of her fingertips, though she's systematically destroyed her usually neat nails. The flush of her skin disappearing into the open _vee_ of her shirt, right down to the familiar pucker of the scar between her breasts. The platinum circle of the engagement ring and the fire of the stone. It dazzles him.  

He thinks of her, years ago, carefully drawing the slender chain out from the confines of her sweater. _This is for the life I lost._

"You don't really want to elope," he says firmly. 

He covers her hand with his own. He thinks of the lift. Of the tiny oblong of cellophane and the hundred versions of it he's saved. The hundred more he's dragged to the trash because they're wrong. Because he knows it's important. He just doesn't know what to _do_ with it, no more in this moment than in any moment before. He doesn't know until she tips her chin up to smile at him. 

"I don't want to elope," she says. She pulls her hand free. She wriggles her fingers, making the colors dance. "I want to marry you in front of everyone."   

* * *

 

She doesn't marry him in front of everyone. She ruins her mother's dress. She goes to her knees too close to a blazing car that he's not in. She searches for him for months, and she never loses faith. Not really. 

She marries him in front of everyone who matters. It's true and it's not. It's right in the moment and a little bit of a pain in the ass right after, because Lanie has a long memory. Because Ryan and Esposito live to make trouble. 

It's still hard and complicated, and it's good and infinitely simple, because she's his wife and he's her husband, and he forgets about it for weeks on end. 

He forgets about the box tucked away where even she won't find it, snoop that she is. He forgets about the simple band he'd meant to give her on their wedding day, stark and plain and beautiful, with the indelible memory of her mother etched into the metal. 

He’d meant to give it to her in private. Something just for the two of them, and there’s no reason he couldn’t give it to her now. On any given Tuesday or whatever, but he doesn’t. 

He forgets about it for long stretches of time, but not really. 

She’s too much Johanna’s daughter. Her legacy and the champion of her cause. She’s too much the very image of the woman he’s only seen in picture frames. In scratched, stuttering video the two of them rescued from Jim’s storage when a late fall memory took her suddenly and they pulled on sweats and landed on his doorstep in nearly the middle of the night to get the key.  

He never forgets, but he . . . waits. For what, he doesn’t know at first. Doesn’t know for a long while. 

It’s not for the hurt of him leaving to fade, or for the answers he finds, such as they are. It’s not for when his betrayals and hers vanish into nothing, because that’s not how it works for them. For anyone, truly, but especially for them. 

He’s not waiting for their first anniversary or the next or the next, though he thinks about it every year. He thinks about on her birthday and Johanna’s. Every January ninth. He thinks about it. The box and the glass slide in the bottom the texture and weight and the cool patience of the perfect circle in his palm. 

He thinks about it and he doesn’t think about it at all. Ebb and flow and ebb until the day she comes home with her knuckles white around a drugstore bag. 

“I should’ve waited,” she blurts. She spills her keys into the bowl by the door and lets her coat fall right to the floor. She shoves the bag into his hand. “The precinct!” She looks at him, pale. “I should’ve waited to be home.”

He cuts her off with a kiss. With a massive whoop of joy as he pulls her into his arms and dances her through the loft. 

“You haven’t even . . . _Castle!_ ” She drags at him. She casts a stricken glance back at the bag where he’s stranded it somewhere in the living room. “You haven’t even _looked_.”  

“Don’t have to look. I know what a plus sign looks like.”

"Two lines!" she snaps back, but he just  tugs her along into the office.

He gives up his hiding place and pulls her into his lap. “For you. It’s for you.” 

He plops the box gracelessly into her palm, then snatches it back. He’s too impatient. After weeks and months and years of waiting— _knowing_ it’s important—he wants to see it on her finger. He creaks open the hinge and plucks it from the velvet. He slides it home on her right hand and it looks just right. A mirror, but not quite, for the everyday band on her left. 

She peers at it, curious. She holds it up to the light. Tilts her head and turns to him. 

“Your mom’s,” he says quickly. “It’s your mom’s.” 

“My mom’s,” she repeats, tonelessly at first, the awestruck as her hand drops to press against her abdomen. The dark fabric of her work suit giving nothing away, because there’s only just been a drugstore bag and an awkward two minutes in a bathroom stall at the precinct and that’s a story he needs to hear. A story she needs to tell, but she’s awestruck now. “How? _When?”_

“When you closed the case. When you got him, but that’s . . . later. I’ll tell you later. ” He covers her hand with his own. He feels the new texture against his palm and it feels right. It feels important. “Right now, it’s for you.” 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading


	4. Undercover

He’s staring.

Even with her attention fixed on the heavy, erratic traffic, she can tell he’s staring. And it’s not like his normal staring. God knows she’s more than used to that. But this is something else. It’s _not-_ staring. It’s . . . looking. It’s sidelong and furtive and since when is _he_ furtive? 

She makes a not-entirely-necessary lane change, complete with a safety-first shoulder check, and just barely catches him. His eyes sliding just barely past hers. Intently not-staring. 

He probably wants her to ask. That’s probably what it’s about. A master plan to draw her into some inane argument. To make her defensive about whatever he thinks is worth not staring at.  The joke’s on him, though, because she’s not playing his game. She’s not asking. She’s not even _noticing._ She’s _driving_ , and he can’t just . . .

“What?” she snaps. 

“ _What_ what?” He blinks innocently. So fucking innocently that she can practically hear it. 

“Don’t _‘what_ what’ me, Castle.” The light turns yellow just as she creeps into the intersection. She’s in the wrong lane, thanks to the lane change. Thanks to him, she’s trapped behind double-parked sociopaths and a line of delusionals who think they’re going to find street parking. She’s annoyed enough to jerk the wheel left and take it out on the accelerator. “You’ve been weird ever since I picked you up. You’ve been . . .” 

“Watch it!” he bellows. 

She whips her head back around just in time to see the stream of bachelorettes lurching out from between SUVs. She brakes hard, pitching them both forward against their seat belts. The tires squeal and the palms of the lead blonde come down on the hood of her cruiser with a meaty thump. Her plastic tiara flies into the windshield, then tumbles right back into her hands. 

“Watch it, _lady._ ” The glass muffles her slurred speech. She jams the tiara back on to her head. She tries to flip them the bird and fails. Her entourage follows suit, like a line of ducklings unsteady on their sparkly, strappy heels.

“You all right?” He turns toward her. He’s shaken, his left still arm flung out across her body as though to catch her. It’s a weirdly fatherly gesture for someone who’s been . . . 

“Staring,” she blurts. She knocks his hand aside, alarmed at how close his fingers are to the scalloped lace edge of her top. “You were staring.” 

“I’m always staring.” He shrugs as he pulls his arm back. A too-casual oversell. “It’s my job to stare at you, Detective.” He demonstrates, dragging his gaze upward. “To note you methods. Especially any . . . exciting new approaches.”  He lands on her cleavage. It’s not furtive at all. 

She looks away. Clutches the wheel tight and wills herself not to blush as she creeps the car forward again, and thank God they’re there. She slides into a loading zone off the alley where a neon arrow points the way to the Package Store about halfway down. 

He hands off the NYPD placard from the glove box before she even asks. He falls in step beside her, even though she’s pushing the pace, bleeding off some of her aggravation with long strides and the satisfying ring of her heels on the brick of the alley. 

He hits the banged-up metal door half a stride before her. He steps into her path, apparently intent on chivalry, and it’s the last straw.

“It’s not an ‘exciting new approach’.” She slaps his hand away from the door’s heavy handle. “I’m undercover.” 

“Not under much,” he mutters, leaning past her for the door again. 

“Are you . . .” She gets in his face this time. Steps right into his path, furious. “Castle, are you actually slut shaming me?” 

“Slut shaming?” He sounds amused. He looks her up and down, from bare knee to the sheer fabric of the long jacket billowing out behind her. “Hardly. Although . . .” 

“Although?” She plants her fists on her hips. “Although _what?_ ”

“I just . . .” Something odd flicks across his face. Laughter. Amusement, but something else. “Are jammies standard at a male a strip club? I mean, it’s my first time, but I wouldn’t think the rules would be _that_ different . . . ”

“Jammies!” she hisses. She clutches the silk edges of her cover-up tight across her chest. She’s furious with herself for even engaging. Even more furious to find herself stealing peeks down at herself, and _goddamn . . ._ “I am _not_ in my . . . this is not _jammies_.” 

“Jammies isn’t right, I guess.” He tilts his head. “Chemise? Negligee? Peignoir? Or isn’t one the inner thing, and the other the outer thing? Is it a set?” 

“It’s a _dress,_ Castle.”  She forces her arms to uncross. Forces her shoulders back and her chin up as she yanks open the door, fuming as she waves him through. “A. Dress.” 

“A dress.” He shrugs. Agrees without agreeing at all. “Too bad, I guess.” 

“Too bad?” Her teeth come down hard on the tip of her tongue. She tastes blood, but it’s too late.

“I’m wearing mine.”  He says low in her ear as he brushes by. “Underneath.”


	5. Undertow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “He doesn't mind winter. Really, he doesn't. January. February. He's never been one to sink into a funk when the solid weeks of grey days settle over the city and the wind is at its cruelest. But it seems long this year. Harder to tuck his chin and grit it out.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set some time shortly after Pandora/Linchpin (4 x 12, 4 x 13). I’ve had this around a long time. I wanted to turn it into something else, but it never seemed to want to be anything but this. I imagine this won’t be popular with anyone but me. It’s not all that popular with me, TBH. 

 

 

He doesn't mind winter. Really, he doesn't. January. February. He's never been one to sink into a funk when the solid weeks of grey days settle over the city and the wind is at its cruelest. But it seems long this year. Harder to tuck his chin and grit it out.

A chill catches him at the strangest times. It sinks into him. Presses. The cold _presses_ and the world seems dark around the edges. He coughs.  Endlessly sometimes, as if it will help. But it doesn't help. He just tastes fear and river water and loss, and that's what this is really about. 

A still-trembling part of his soul that remembers how close he came to failing. That still _viscerally_ feels the panic of tugging and tugging at the gun caught up in the under-seat coils. The conviction that there was no chance the gun would fire even if he _could_ free it. No chance he'd have the time and strength and breath enough to free her and kick up and up toward daylight.

There's a still-trembling part of his soul that's sure he _did_ fail. That he's dead or insane or whatever, and in that light, the biting wind should be comforting, really. The cold scouring his cheeks and the little-seen sun blinding him when it does pierce the clouds. They're all proof of life. A gift, or they should feel like it.

But he worries every minute that he'll lose her before he ever has her. He worries every minute that his choices, then and now, will get her killed. They’ve come so close so often already, but the burden is so entirely his this time. Sophia. The river. The cold, and he sees her shivering from it, too. All these weeks on, she’s still shivering, just like he is. 

They’re through it. They lived, and he should savor even the cold. But the winter seems long this year.

 

* * *

 

Alexis notices. Everybody notices. That he's grimmer. Quieter and less prone to mess around, particularly when they're actually on a case, but he supposes his daughter bears the brunt of it. When the door of the loft closes behind him. When he finally stumbles home from the precinct,  and the cold takes him by surprise. She bears the brunt, but it's not as simple as that. 

She's watchful. Attuned to spells like this, when he's gloomy and walks the floors at night. She always has been, to some extent. A caregiver, because she decided somewhere along the way that he needed one. But it's not as simple as that, either. 

There’s the damned internship. The inside look it gives her into everything he’d spare her if he could. The up-close-and-personal with the things he doesn’t spare himself. All of it on top of a truth he’s been side stepping for months. 

She's not over the shooting. She’s absolutely not, and he can't say she should be. He can't say he _wants_ his kid to be over something like that. But it's so far beyond anything as simple as fear or her first real brush with violence.

She's angry about the risks he takes. Risks she has a ring-side seat for now. She’s angry with him, and angrier still with Beckett. She blames her for more than she probably realizes. Offloads fear and anguish that, by rights, belongs at his feet.  

And on top of that—anger and fear and the rest of it—she’s indignant. Sweetly, romantically, wrongheadedly indignant about . . . everything else. She’s no longer satisfied with _enough for now_ or anything at all about the state that he and Beckett are in. The state they're _all_ in, because she knows that stories have a way of seeking resolution.  

She knows his _real_ secret. The deal he’s made for Kate’s life and the fragility of it. How easily it could end in another bullet. A stray or a warning meant for the good detective. A car blowing a light, slamming into her undercover while they’re on they’re way to routine body.     

And it's not even the point right now. Beckett's shooting. Her mother's case. It's not even the point, as far as Alexis is concerned. She's had to bring him dry clothes when he almost drowned. When he was even closer to Blakely when the supposedly dead man was gunned down than he'd been to Kate that day in the cemetery, and there's exactly no way to have a conversation about that. A conversation with his eighteen-year-old daughter that starts with explaining they were all being played the whole time by someone _he'd_ made the mistake of trusting. Someone _he'd_ made mistakes with so, _so_ long ago.

The shooting. The river. The brittle fact of this too-long winter. None of it's the point, and all of it is. It's all mixed up for her. Fear and resentment and a nearly life-long sense that it's the two of them against the world. But she has a good heart. A kind heart, so she pulls him out of bed one morning and tells him it's time. She tells him it's halfway to summer. 

 

* * *

 

 

It's a ritual of theirs. She'd had a mercifully rare bad spell when she was eight. Some ancient terror of a teacher who'd taken a dislike to her. And Meredith had been receding further and further from their lives. Alexis had hated school that year, starkly. Instantly. She'd pitifully tried to fake illness, then genuinely made herself sick with worry. 

He'd been at a complete loss. Scouring for other schools. More than willing to throw money at the problem or take any reasonable advice, but there was none to be had. Administrators and experts alike greeted him with a side-eye and the foregone conclusion that he was overreacting. With delicate and not-so-delicate suggestions that mothers were really better suited to dealing matters like these. And in any case, another school was out. Alexis had cried and cried at the very thought of even more upheaval.

So he'd taught her about Zeno's paradox, and they'd turned it into a game. A wall of the loft he’d transformed into a huge calendar. Divided in half and half and half until the end of school. Until summer and the Hamptons and the wonders of midnight stargazing. The magic of a tide pool through a magnifying glass. 

He'd bought her little gifts to measure the distance. Odds and ends at first, for making it through a week, a day, an hour on art days because everything was set up for right handers, and she'd smudge and knock into things.   

And then she found her voice that winter. At home, at least, and she asked for summer things. A bright beach towel and an excavator she could sit astride and work the levers, moving sand here and there. Flip-flops and an old-fashioned flowered bathing cap she’d seen a picture of her grandmother in. 

So he’d find them. He’d hunt them down and mete them out. She'd pack them, storing up for a little while, then tucking them away in beach bags and the tiny rolling suitcase she’d leave sitting open by her bed. Filling up a little more with each halfway stop.

They honor it still, but the ritual's been pared down over the years. They haven’t done a calendar in forever, and even the gifts have tapered off to nothing. To a once-in-a-while text each with some ridiculous thing or other. A reply suggesting where in the Hamptons house it'll go or who, exactly, will have first rights to lounge or ride or launch each new addition. 

Sometimes the joke of it is enough, But they make a trip or two when the streets are still ankle-deep in slush. Every year they go on the hunt and come home lugging bags and boxes in colors fit for a different, kinder sun. 

He's not in the mood the morning she pulls him out of bed. Not remotely inclined to think well of summer, however long this winter is. The season hasn’t been kind to him in years, and he’s not in the mood, but he goes.  He does his level best to throw himself into it, and the absurdity works on him before too long. Wind keen enough to slice awnings clean off store fronts. Newspaper boxes and car doors sealed with thick sheets of ice, and still, every window filled with bright-striped umbrellas and beach scenes. 

It catches him. Lifts hims, and by the time they practically fall, laughing, through the doors of some place that specializes in enormous, ludicrous pool floats, he's almost himself. He's almost halfway to summer until he sees it. A bright red raft, dangling from fishing line high overhead, shaped like a car.  

 

* * *

 

He knows what it is. The thing coiling around his chest, tighter with every shallow breath. The spots at the edges of his vision are all too familiar, like stars turned inside out, and it’s nothing like the first time the ground has suddenly started to tilt crazily beneath his feet. His brain somewhere— _somewhere_ —knows damned well what a panic attack is, and he's angry. _Furious_ that it's happening to him. Here. Now. _Weeks_ after the fact over a damned pool float.

He's furious that Alexis seeing him like this. His _kid._ He's furious that she knows what to do. That she moves him swiftly and efficiently away to a quiet end of the store. She counts breaths with him and runs interference with store personnel as they drift closer, loud and disruptive in their concern. She lets him pace. Tells him to focus on the cracks and dents in the floor. The scuff marks. The exact number of tiles and he's so _furious_ that he's the reason she's good at this. The reason she's had to be, and he just wants to go. 

They do. They leave in silence. He looks out one window and she looks out the other in the taxi on the way home. He's grateful. Embarrassed and humiliated, but grateful until she stops him with a handful of words. He's more than halfway across the living room, desperate to be out of  clothes gone sour with sweat and fear, but she stops him. 

"Do you talk to her about it?" There's only silence on either side. "Beckett," she says, as though he might be confused. As though he might wonder which _her_ she could possibly mean. "Does she know about the summer? All the times this has happened since the cemetery?"

He wants to defend her. Kate. He wants to say out loud what it was like to watch her dissolve right before his eyes when they worked the sniper case. To look away and pretend he didn't see the blood-soaked bandage at her wrist or smell alcohol under skin she'd scrubbed almost raw trying to hide it. He wants to shout that it's screwed up and complicated and damned near impossible to even know where to start, but what comes out is simpler. More devastating or maybe healthier or who the hell knows? 

"I don't," he says without turning to face her. "We don't talk about what it was like. For either of us.” There’s an edge to the last words. A reminder that whatever could have been, he’s not the one with a hole in his chest.

She’s chastened, though doesn't quite deflate. She's too angry for that. Too scared and caught up in the mess of recent history. Scars on top of scars on top of scars, all of them silent. All of their stories untold. 

“How does that work?” she asks, her voice somehow brittle and willing at the same time. Willing to listen. To understand if he only had the words. “How is that supposed to work?” 

It’s wrenching. Painful, like she’s turning into a woman right before his eyes and he’s not ready. He’s nothing like ready. He opens his mouth to tell her it’s complicated, but the story comes out. Half a dozen stories from then and now. What he thought Sophia was. What Kate _is_ beneath her scars. What she could be and what _he’s_ become these last few years by her side. 

He talks to her, man to woman, and it’s ragged and awkward and _draining_ for both of them. It’s not exactly catharsis. She doesn’t exactly understand or accept any of it, but she has a kind heart. She pushes herself up from the chair when it’s enough for now. 

“Ok,” she murmurs as she plants a kiss on his forehead. “Ok, dad.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I dunno as the kid of a cop, I've always had some sympathy for Alexis's anger in S4, though it was not handled well on canvas.


	6. Best in Show

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's not the best sex they've ever had.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A Watershed (5 x 24) tag (or Valkyrie [6 x 01] insert, I suppose).

 

It's not the best sex they've ever had. The hissing, insidious thought  drifts throughout her mind, even though she's heavy-limbed and panting. Boneless on the mattress diagonal and wondering where the pillows could've gotten to. Wondering if they’ve run off with the sheets and duvet and miscellaneous crap that lives on her nightstand. She's staring up at the bedroom ceiling that won't be hers for much longer, and she's satisfied—undeniably satisfied—and still . . . pent up somehow. 

She flexes her feet. Wriggles her hips a little, trying to work off the residual tension she's definitely not used to. She peers down at him, drowsing low against her ribs, and feels unkind. Ungrateful that here she is, with the unfamiliar weight of an absolutely stunning ring on her finger, and here _he_ is, with her and in this thing for the long haul. With her always, even though she's leaving, and all she can think is . . . it's not the best sex they've ever had. 

"We should have a party." The muzzy rumble of his voice startles her. She jumps at the whisper of his lips against the bare, vulnerable skin of belly. "We _have_ to have a party." 

"An engagement party," she says. The pause is too long in her ears. Eternal, and her voice is too loud. Too bright, but the idea makes her insides seize. 

"Engagement?" His head pops up. His hair is standing every which way. He's the picture of puzzlement. "Oh. Yeah. It can be a twofer. Definitely a party, though. We can . . ." 

"Twofer?" She rolls on to one hip. Rolls her body out from under his, and all of a sudden, they're at right angles. "This and what?" 

She shows him the back of her left hand. The diamond catches the light, sending rainbows chasing down the slope of his shoulder. Across his face as he clambers on to his elbows, smiling.

"It looks good, don't you think?" He catches her fingers and folds them. He dusts a kiss and a grin across her knuckles. It's tender. It's hopeful and sweet. It's changing the damned subject. 

"It's beautiful," she snaps. She swings her feet to the floor, and crosses the room for her robe on legs that still feel like jelly. She feels the weight of his slack-jawed surprise at her back. “It’s _breathtaking_ , Castle.” 

"And that . . . annoys you?" His voice is muffled as he leans off the bed to fish for his boxers in the mixed-up heap of their hastily shed clothes. 

"I'm not annoyed." She wheels to face him, jerking the sash tight. "I'm just . . . what else is there to—“ 

"Your job." He's on his feet, sliding an arm around her and bringing her hand, ring and all, up between them. He’s trying to salvage whatever she’s suddenly determined to set fire to. " _This_ and your amazing new job."

"Castle, you don't . . ." 

She struggles and leans against him at the same time. Wants to pace over some of this strange, ugly energy and crawl back under the covers with him until the very minute she has to get on plane. Because she has to get on a plane, and she doesn’t even know when, and he’s being all . . . 

”You win the . . ." She casts about for the word. Flushes with embarrassment when she finds it. ”You win the boyfriend blue ribbon already, ok? You don't have to act like a going-away party—”

"First of all, it's the fiancé sweepstakes. You said yes, remember? Second, it's not a going-away party." 

He drops his hands to her hips as he says it. He fixes her with a mock–stern look, but there's tension in it. Tension in the line of his shoulders and spine, and it strikes her the sex doesn’t seem to have been the best for him either. It snaps the top off something in her. The pent-up feeling that's just _wrong_ between them with the sheets still cooling. 

"But it is." She pushes off his body. Tries to waves him away when he gives chase. "It _would_ be, and you win, ok? Running out and buying this fucking gorgeous ring when you knew there was a better than even chance . . ." 

"Running _out?_ " He stops dead where he is. "You think I just ran out and bought this?" He grabs her hand. He lifts it right up to her face, then drops it hard. "You don't believe me." 

He takes a step back. A full step back, and it's awful. 

"Believe you? Castle, I—“ 

He doesn't let her finish. "I wouldn't manipulate you like that." She makes a helpless, half-hearted grab for his hand, but his arms are stiff at his sides. "I wouldn't ask you to marry me just to hold on to you. And if my word isn't good enough, let me let you in on something: That isn't the kind of ring you can just run out and grab."  

"I didn't mean . . ." Her eyes drop. Her cheeks burn. The ring glitters through the embarrassed tears she can't blink back. “Castle, I’m sorry. I just meant . . . you were mad, and . . .” 

“Of course I was fucking mad, Kate.” He turns his back on her. His hands clench into fists. “But not about the job.” 

“Really?” She can’t let that go. Not when they’re fifteen feet from where he walked out on her. “Because you sure as hell seemed mad.” 

“I was mad”—he whips toward her again. Advances on her—“I _am_ mad, because you didn’t fucking _tell me.”_

“Because I never thought . . “ 

“When have I ever”—he stops just short of her, his voice low and eerily restrained—“ever done _anything_ to make you think I would try to hold you back?”

Something furious rises in her. Something pent up and probably pretty fucking unhealthy. 

_When you walked out!_

She’s a breath way from screaming it in his face. A breath away, but there’s something flinty in the way he’s standing toe to toe with her. There’s something in his anger that grounds her. It takes the furious, pent-up thing and transforms it. 

“Never.” She kisses him savagely. “Not once.” 

He catches her. He fists a hand in her hair and knocks her back to the bed. He pins her down and looms over her. “Then let me throw you a fucking party.” 

* * *

“You ok?” he asks softly. 

“Ok?” 

She shivers as his breath cools against her neck. 

“I am . . . that  was . . . ” 

She rolls into his body. She presses every inch of herself to him, smiling over his shoulder at the riot of pillows on the floor. At the toppled bedside lamp and the ruin of her robe. 

“That was the best.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was stubborn and feels like “fix-it fic,” which I don’t usually like or do, but I’m trying to fight the urge to scrap everything. I have issues. Lots of Watershed issues. 


	7. Closer to Fine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “It’s not out of the blue, really, but she smiles behind a magazine and pretends like it is. They’re both doing a lot of pretending, but it’s gotten to be ok. Mostly ok.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Early Season 7, probably after Clear and Present Danger (7 x 03). The movies referenced are Captain America: The First Avenger and Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

 

The best thing you've ever done for me  
Is to help me take my life less seriously, it's only life after all  
Well darkness has a hunger that's insatiable  
And lightness has a call that's hard to hear

— Indigo Girls, "Closer to Fine" 

* * *

 

"A movie night," he says out of the blue. "We should have a movie night." 

It's not out of the blue, really, but she smiles behind a magazine and pretends like it is. They're both doing a lot of pretending, but it’s gotten to be ok. Mostly ok.  

"A Movie Night?" She turns a glossy page with exaggerated care. "Or a _movie_ night?" 

"What's the difference?" He flips the cover of his iPad closed and sets it aside. He leans forward, eager for an answer he already knows. 

"I don't see a lot of movies on _movie_ night." She arches an eyebrow, lowering the Robert Downey, Jr., cover just enough to let him see. “In fact, there are a lot of movies I’ve _wanted_ to see that I haven’t seen on _movie_ night.” 

"Is that a complaint?" 

He crawls across the couch. He tries to snatch the _Vanity Fair_ from her, but she's too quick. She holds it high and retreats to the arm, making him give chase. 

"Not _exactly_ , a complaint." 

He catches her. She lets him. They jostle together, stretched out and comfortable, taking up the whole of the couch. 

"Good," he mumbles against her neck. "Because _movie_ nights are, like, my favorite." 

"Mine too." She lets her head tip back. She lets herself go loose. "So what movie do you not want to see?" 

"Oh!" His head pops up. He digs an elbow into the couch and props himself up, laughing at her grumble of protest as the move tosses her from side to side. "I actually meant a Movie Night. Like. With everyone?" His eyes flick toward her. He wants to see if she heard the question mark after everyone, and it breaks her heart a little. "Like Ryan and Jenny and Espo and Lanie . . ." He scowls. "Except those two can't sit together. I'm not suffering through Javier's 'moves' again." 

She laughs at the air quotes. She laughs a little harder than it really merits, because he's eager and unsure and it breaks her heart. 

He wants everything to be fine. She gets that now.  Ever since Montreal, she gets that he’s not just _acting_ like everything's fine, because he _wants_ it.  

He wants two months back. He wants him and her and _them_ to be the way they were before that day in May. He wants to lift the weight from Alexis’s shoulders and coax the brittleness out of Martha. He wants the boys' trust again and a smile from Lanie that goes all the way up to her eyes. He _wants_ them all to be fine, and she’s sorry for not seeing that right away.

"Javi can sit in _that_ chair." She points with her toe at the straight-backed armless thing she hates. He makes a face. It's a long-standing argument and another little bit of Everything's Fine theater.  She plays her part, and runs right over him before he can protest. ”There can be pizza.” 

“Ooh, Stefano’s!" he says brightly. He plays his part, too. Gives her thigh an appreciative squeeze, it's mostly ok.  

" _Not_ Stefano's," she scowls, then relents. "Stefano's and someplace less . . . floppy." 

"Floppy is integral to New York–style pizza." He rolls on to his back. Pretends to pout. "Floppy is _good._ " 

“Disagree.” She clambers on top of him. She sits up straight and wriggles her hips. She plants her palms on his shoulders. “Floppy is a problem to be solved.” 

 

* * *

 

It’s a double feature in the end. A _movie_ night and a Movie Night.  

“A refresher is _essential,”_ he calls out across the loft. 

She's hunting down the popcorn bowl and trying to work the cork out of a bottle of wine all at the same time. He’s in the living room, fiddling with shades and cords and the fancy screen he splurged on for the occasion.

  
“Essential,” she snorts. “You just think you’re going to get lucky before everyone else gets here.” 

He appears suddenly at her side. He plucks the bag of microwave popcorn from her hands and shakes it vigorously. He curves his shoulders aground the huge popcorn bowl, trying to hide whatever disgusting thing he's adding. 

“I will admit that if you just _happen_ to find yourself inspired by Cap’s transformation,"  he flicks a glance over his shoulder, "I am here to be your . .  . creative outlet.” 

She doesn't bother answering. She shoves a wine glass into his hand and tugs him by the elbow toward the couch. They offload their burdens and tumble together. He flicks a switch and everything happens at once. The lights dim and the move rolls, and it's comfortable. It's lovely and warm and better than fine. 

She cries a little over the dance that Peggy and Steve never get to have. He teases her, even though his own eyes are suspiciously bright. She swats at him, and he pulls her into his arms. They dance to a Big Band song they make up as they go along. 

She hums a snatch of melody and he answers back. They make up dirty lyrics, laughing and letting their hands roam, even though everyone will be there any minute. They tumble to the couch. They can't get enough of one another, and they come up, rumpled and obvious when the buzzer rings. 

"Well, _this_ is not PG-13." 

Lanie has her hands on her hips, and Esposito looks traumatized. But she raises up on her tip toes to kiss Castle's cheek. He shakes Castle's hand hard and claps him on the back, and to Kate, all seems right with the world when Jenny and Ryan spill out of the elevator and into the big, open room. 

They’re rowdy and at ease. Everyone shushes everyone else loudly, but they talk and joke. 

“Aw, man check this. The pirates . . . 

Castle tosses a pillow. “Esposito do _not_ spoil me.” 

“So, Captain America doesn't like the _Snakes on a Plane_ guy?” Jenny asks timidly.  

The room erupts. They pause the movie and all shout over each other, trying to explain. Trying to catch her up on three lifetimes worth of Marvel history. 

It's wonderful. It's so much better than fine for a good long while, and then it's not. Then it's absolutely _not_ fine. Peggy Carter's voice fades out and Steve Rogers is at her bedside. Seventy years gone for her, and not a day for him. He holds Peggy's hand, and the camera lingers on silver-framed photos. The score eases into a Big Band tune that never was, and it's awful. 

Castle tenses beside her. His arm tightens around her shoulder and the iron grip of his fingers turns both their knuckles white. Her own spine stiffens. She huddles closer to him. 

Peggy's voice is strong, then weak, then strong again. 

_The world has changed and none of us can go back. All we can do is our best, and sometimes the best that we can do is start over . . ._

It's bad, but how could she have known? They were so busy with . . . everything back in April. With Vulcan Simmons and Bracken and trying to plan a huge wedding in an impossibly short time. And the movie came and went without either of them really noticing  

"Hey," she says, barely audible in his ear. 

"Yeah." He turns toward her. Their noses brush and he gives her the briefest of kisses, nothing more. "Yeah," he says again, and she thinks they'll make it. 

"No make-out noises!"  Esposito mutters from the uncomfortable chair. 

"Seriously,"  Ryan echoes. "Gross." 

Lanie reaches out to smack Javi. Jenny laughs and elbows Kevin, and she thinks they'll make it, 

But Peggy's eyes go wide on the screen, then. Tears run down her face as she recognizes Steve for the first time all over again, and it's devastating. 

"Sorry." Castle is on his feet. He's halfway to the office. "Sorry." 

"Hey, man . . . " 

Esposito calls after him.  Ryan is half out of his seat, but Jenny tugs him back. 

"Kev," she shakes her head. "No." 

"Sorry," Kate repeats. It barely comes out. Her throat is tight, but Lanie's hand is on her shoulder blade, propelling her onward.  

"We've got pizza," her friend smiles. "We've got beer and _plenty_ to talk about. You go." 

So she goes. 

 

* * *

 

He’s shaking. With his palms braced against the glass wall of the office, he’s gulping down breaths and shaking. 

“Rick.” She runs into him. Straight into the broad expanse of his back and wraps her arms around his waist. “Sorry,” she says. Over and over. “Sorry.” 

He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t turn, though his hands grip her wrists. A tight criss-cross around his body. 

“What if it happens again?” 

It’s an awful question. A horrible, fucking _unacceptable_ question, and she feels like he’s some how dug it out of the most lightless corner of her soul. 

“It won’t.” She jerks her hands free. She spins his body toward her with strength she wouldn’t have thought she had three seconds ago. She’s shouting. She’s painfully aware of the blue glow pouring from the living room through the bookshelves, and still, she’s shouting. “Do you understand? It will _not_ happen again. Why? Why would it happen again?” 

“I don’t know. Why wouldn’t it? Why did it happen in the first place? I don’t know.” His voice is broken. Exhausted, but the way he leans into her is some kind of relief. “I’m sorry, Kate. I’m sorry I don’t know. I’m sorry I can’t remember . . .” 

“It’s okay,” she whispers against his chest. It’s inane. It’s the kind of thing you say when there’s nothing to say, and she hates it. “Everything’s okay, Castle. Everything’s fine.” 

“It’s really not.” He laughs as he says it. It’s grim and ragged, but it’s a laugh. “Everything is really not fine.” 

“No. But it’s closer, isn’t it?” She reaches up to tilt his face to the light  she runs her thumb over the last pink patch of sunburn. "Tonight. Like this?" She tips her head toward the living room. The low hum of people who love them.  "Isn't it closer?" 

“Closer,” he says. He lets his head rest in the curve of her palm. “It’s closer.”

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading. I'm sorry these are so rough. It's a challenge to churn them out.


	8. Only an Idiot

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Meredith is a mistake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> insert for Always Buy Retail (1 x 06).

 

 

 

Any man can make mistakes, 

but only an idiot persists in his error.

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

* * *

 

Meredith is a mistake. 

The thought isn't novel. Not by a long shot, so even when she makes her afterglow-dispelling announcement, there's no dramatic clash of cymbals. No sad trombone or record scratch. The universe, it seems, doesn’t have the energy for fanfare of the obvious. 

_I'm moving back to New York!_

It's not even a surprise, honestly. Naked and contemplating the ruins of his bed, he can't say either the thought _or_ the unwelcome development is anything like a surprise. 

She's always been a mistake, albeit an intermittently pleasant one. But that's what's new, isn't it? It's a sobering realization. A depressing one, but true anyhow: She's not pleasant. 

 _This_ isn't pleasant, beyond the obvious, anyway. Beyond the _Good God it's Been a While_ of it. Beyond the fact that he knows these particular steps from way back, and the reality that a motivated Meredith is an attentive Meredith. And that's absolutely the extent of it. That's where anything even arguably pleasant about . . . this . . .  ends.  

She's a mistake. She's always _been_ a mistake. He's known that in some ruthless part of himself for a long time. Some ruthless part of him born the instant Alexis first opened her wide blue eyes. He's _always_ known, but this is different. 

He wonders _how_ it’s different as he tugs his clothes on. Meredith is long gone. She was up and dressed and out as soon as she'd dropped her bombshell, and that's at least a relief. That he doesn't have to face her as he surveys the damage again, literal and metaphorical, and wonders how it's different. 

 _Alexis,_ he thinks, and that’s part of it. She's not a kid any more. She's not charmed by her mother's caprice, and she’s certainly not blind to the proprietary way Meredith had dropped her luggage in the master bedroom. 

But she’s resigned to it, and that’s depressing enough to flatten him. It's depressing that there's not one iota of little-girl fantasy that Mom and Dad might get back together, and he'd like to tell himself _that's_ what's different. It's true. The bitch of it is that it's partly true. 

With her usual impeccable timing, Meredith's managed to force the issue. To foment chaos and fast-forward his life right into conversations he hadn't planned on having with his teenage daughter before the ink was dry on his divorce papers. His _second_ set of divorce papers. 

But it’s not _just_ Alexis. As much as he’d like the gnawing, nagging feeling in his gut to start and end with what it all means for his kid, it’s not. 

He checks his phone. There's a text and another text and another. _Beckett._ His insides see-saw at the name. There’s a body. There's a case, and thank God for that. Thank god for something other than fucking Meredith to think about.

 

* * *

 

She’s busy when he gets to the crime scene. 

 _Finally,_ gets to the crime scene she notes crisply when he rolls in, but that’s all the attention she has to spare at first. 

She’s preoccupied, and he knows he should have his notebook out. He doesn’t know how Nikki moves yet. He doesn’t know how she dresses or walks or comes to rest, and he needs to steal moments when she’s not yelling at him or inflicting pain to get the details down. 

He’s preoccupied, too, though. Too preoccupied with Meredith and mistakes to do more than watch. It works just as well. He watches Beckett. He banishes Meredith with adjectives for her. For Nikki. He pushes the capital-M _Mistake_ to the corners of his mind with something infinitely more interesting. 

 _Lithe,_ he thinks. _Efficient,_ and he makes note of the dark clothes, practical, but flattering. He stores away the striking picture she makes against the backdrop of the warehouse’s irregularly blacked-out windows, and notes that he likes the trailing blue scarf looped around her neck. The pop of color that’s not exactly feminine, but not as practical as the rest of her ensemble, either. He likes the bristly fall of her hair and the way the harsh wine-red color is growing out. 

“You ok?” She sounds annoyed. 

That’s not exactly a novelty, but it startles him. It flips some deeply unfortunate switch after the morning he’s had. 

“I had sex with with my ex-wife this morning.”  It’s a confession he only just then realizes he absolutely, definitely never, _ever_ intended to make to Kate Beckett that comes tumbling out. He only just realizes with a distinctly sinking feeling that it’s a confession at all. 

He only just realizes half a dozen distinctly troubling things, but she hardly flicks a glance his way. She hardly bothers with a minute shake of her head, even as he babbles on. Even as he whines and looks to the boys for sympathy, for some kind of boys-will-be-boys fist bump or . . . something. She hardly bothers with him at all until she snaps. Until his blather trips some switch in her. 

“Castle!” she snaps. “A little respect here?” 

“I don’t think he can hear me.” 

It’s a nasty thing to say in its own right. Nastier still because he knows now what a crime scene means to her. How the indignities visited on the victim must conjure up that January alley for her, and it’s the one thing he does know about Nikki. He knows her rituals and the quiet weight she carries in moments like these. He’s written them—sketches of scenes he can already envision stitching together into the story that can hardly wait to make its way on to the page. He knows he’s being nasty, but he’s angry. He’s unnerved and upset and it has something to do with her and with Meredith. It has everything to do with that. 

“How about some self-respect, then?” 

She’s smirks as she says it. She turns her back on the clearly impossible, and all he can think is: Meredith was a mistake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I originally began this as a chapter in Just About—which is an unfinished series of short S1 pieces. But although I think I know where that story ends, I haven’t yet found the middle, and this piece never quite wanted to be a bridge. I am not sure it stands on its own as a work, but I’m trying to remind myself that this month’s endeavor is about ENDEAVOR for its own sake.


	9. Waiting for the Echo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "When is a waiting room not a waiting room?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An oddball insert for “Famous Last Words” (2 x 07). I’d planned for this conversation to end up differently, but it didn’t want to go where I’d envisioned it. Also:

 

"When is a waiting room not a waiting room?" 

It’s the dead of night. They’re slumped side by side in hard-armed chairs with sagging seats, and he's asking the ceiling, really. He's asking stained acoustic tile and brutal fluorescent light. 

She answers anyway, even though he's not really asking her. Even though he’s not really asking. 

"When it's a writing desk?" 

"Or a raven." His head is tipped back against the hideous hospital-green wall, but he turns to give her a faded grin. 

A gurney slams into the metal kick-plate on the far side of the Emergency Room's double-wide doors, and they hear it again: Sky Blue screaming out for her sister, among other things. Her voice is miserable. Ragged. 

They hear it every once in a while. Whenever the doors groan open, but mostly they don't. Mostly they don't hear much other than the infomercial buzzing on the corner TV and the drop of cans and bags and cellophane packets into the bottom of the vending machines. 

"You can go." She means it as an offer, but it doesn't quite come out that way. His jaw twitches, and she sees it didn't come out that way, so she tries again. "I just mean I don't mind waiting . . .  Watching to be sure she makes it into an actual bed eventually. But they're probably not gonna give us much more information on where she goes from here." 

She nods sideways at the nurse behind the desk. The one he's been calling The Obstructor. The little they've gotten out of the staff has come courtesy of the badge, but The Obstructor's having none of that, and somewhere along the way, the two of them agreed without agreeing to wait and see. To wait for something. 

"Stings, doesn't it?" He follows her gaze and arches an eyebrow. "Knowing there are limits to your cop powers." 

"Not that many limits, Castle. So watch yourself." 

She pointedly shifts her attention back to the infomercial, though she's just as glad he doesn't seem to be going. He stretches his legs out and leans his head back again, settling in, and she’s just as glad to  have the company in this weird, in-between state. 

“How long was it just them?” he asks a while later. 

Her eyes pop open. The wavy-lined people on the corner TV have a whole new set of problems—scalding pasta water, not just bath towels that won’t stay put—and she wonders how long a while it’s been exactly. 

“Parents . . .” A yawn sneaks in and breaks up the words. She plants her palms and sits up straight, trying to rouse herself. “I think the media file we pulled together said the parents died about ten years ago?” 

“Sky would’ve been, what? Fifteen?”  His head swings toward the double doors as sound bleeds through. A voice. Maybe Sky’s. Maybe not.

“Sixteen, I think.” She does the math. Sees a slide-show in her head. Badly lit photos from the sisters’ coffee-house days. “And Hayley would’ve been eighteen? Old enough to keep them out of foster care.” 

“And young enough to get roped in by scum like John McGinnis.” His knuckles go white around the arms of the chair. He has that look again. The one that made her ask in the first place. The one that made her offer to drive. “Eighteen. Who can deal with that at eight . . .?” He trails off, color painting his cheeks as he does some math of his own.  

She wants to say something. A half-blunted reflex rises up to tell him that she doesn’t need his pity, but it meets the miserable look on his face. It meets the realization that it’s not pity for her, any more than it is for Sky, so she doesn’t. She doesn’t say anything. 

“Do you think it would have helped?” The question seems to sneak out of him. He sets his teeth like he’d like to take it back, but now that it’s out, it has a life of its own. “Having a sister. Or a brother? Would it have been easier?” 

She’s at a loss. It’s a question she’s never asked herself. A question she wants to give a resounding _No_ to, and she’s not even sure why. She’s literally never thought about it, and it’s strange. In the dead of night, waiting for nothing, she realizes it’s strange. 

“I  never . . .” She feels the color come into her own cheeks. “I mean. It was hard. With my dad. And I don’t know. Maybe it would have been easier to have someone who _was_ there—could have been there—right after. Or if it would have just been one more broken thing . . .” 

He nods. His hands pluck at the nasty, nubbly fabric of the chair. He wants to ask . . . something. A million somethings if she knows him at all, but he’s not asking for the moment, and she feels a rush of something for him. Not gratitude, exactly, but openness. A dead-of-night lowering of defenses. 

“Did you ever want one?” she finds herself asking. “A brother or sister?” 

“A brother,” he says right away. Definite, but then there’s a wry twist of his mouth. “Sometimes I thought a big brother would be cool.” He sneaks a sideways glance. “For the usual reasons. _R_ -rated movie chaperone. Beating up bullies. Reminding me not to wear Aquaman Underoos to school on gym days.” 

“Aquaman Underoos.” She barks out a laugh. Claps a hand over her mouth when it comes out too loud. “ _Aquaman._ ” 

“They weren’t the _only_ ones I had,” he shoots back, then catches himself. “That’s . . . not really a defense, is it?” 

“Depends.” She drags out the moment. “Did you have Wonder Woman?” 

“I feel like this is a trick question.” 

“I’m a cop, Castle.” She leans back in the awful chair. She folds her arms and settles in to wait for something, strangely glad he’s there. “They’re all trick questions.” 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cora Clavia gets the Underoo blame. 


	10. Asymptote

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "She feels . . . on. Crackling and focused and hell bent in the best possible way."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A 47 Seconds (4 x 19) insert, because Brain!Poneh NEEDS to draw out the possible infinitely.

 

She feels . . . on. Crackling and focused and hell bent in the best possible way. It's strange. In and of itself, because she feels like herself for the first time in . . . she can't say. Before her shooting. Before her mom. She can't say.

And it's strange in context. In juxtaposition to the free-floating desperation in the precinct. Free-floating desperation that winds its way through the bullpen. Through every interview, observation, and interrogation room, and they're all full to overflowing.

They’ve called in extra shifts and extra on top of that. They’ve hauled chairs up and out and over to accommodate everyone. They’re full to overflowing with bystanders from the plaza—anyone who might know anything—and they're all shell shocked. Literally shell shocked, and every cop is head down and hollow eyed with it.

Every cop but her. Every civilian but him, because the two of them are . . . somewhere at last. Somewhere, and that’s the secret.

_It makes you think about all those things in your own life that you don't want to put off any more._

She hears her own voice, quiet but unwavering. She's scanning the list of witnesses. She's weighing possibilities and crafting a plan of attack. She's focused utterly on the case—on the horrors close at hand, and still, she remembers his eyes widening. She remembers how his face brightened suddenly with the hope that's always there. Always just beneath the surface, and it’s beautiful as it comes to light.

They're somewhere. They've arrived, sooner than he'd hoped. Sooner than she thought possible, and there ought to be some kind of self-reproach in that, given everything. Given this terrible day, any kind of joy ought to prompt some swell of guilt that she’s even thinking about him—about them—but there's nothing of the kind. For her or him. Nothing of the kind.

She feels his eyes on her now and then. She lifts her own, and he's there. He's working, but crackling too. As hell bent as she is. Focused and on.

* * *

 

It's not quite funny. Almost, but not quite when life derails them again. It's Ryan this time. Ryan calling out at the most inopportune moment possible. She grits her teeth and wonders if he and Esposito take turns or draw straws or what. She wonders how sophisticated their surveillance system must be. They have to have one. They must, given their absolutely uncanny timing.

_. . . All the opportunities they'll never have. I don't want that to happen . . ._

_Beckett. We've got something._

Castle's face crumples. His eyes find hers, and it's almost funny how easy it is to read the scroll of emotions across his face. Dismay. Frustration. Longing. Determination. More than a little homicidal intent toward Ryan.

And relief.

That brings her blood to the surface. Her own determination. She makes a quick scan of the bullpen, and she's wondering—actually wondering down to logistics, consequences, deniability—if there's anything big enough to stuff Ryan in to buy them two more goddamned minutes.

She doesn't want him to be relieved. She doesn't want to let either of them off the hook, but the moment passes. They have a job to do.

They always have a damned job to do.

 

* * *

 

It's electrifying. The realization that the bomber is in the building. That he's been in the building for going on an hour, and whatever he has planned might be unfolding even now.

_Andrew Haynes_

Saying the name out loud has a kind of power. It always does, and she lets it wash over her now. She listens to Castle’s voice. To his sharp, to-the-point questions and answers. They filter in, intertwining with her own thoughts. She shapes and remakes as she goes. She knows this, he wonders about that and a picture of this man—this villain—comes together.

She asks questions of her own. Paints the picture right along with him and with Ryan until she’s ready. Until she feels armed and fortified and absolutely prepared to meet the enemy head on. It narrows to the two of them. Ryan and Haynes and the rest of the busy, buzzing, noisome world falls away.

  
_Why is he strolling in here just as cool as could be?_

_He’s proud of what he's done, can't wait to tell someone about it._

_Well then, let's give him the opportunity to do just that._

He leaves the room on her heels. He falls in step, and she turns with regret just outside the door. Just on the threshold of something like evil she turns and lays a hand on his arm.

"Castle, not this—" she stops mid-sentence when she lifts her eyes to his. She sags against the door jamb, undone by the fire in his eyes. The fierce, focused passion.

"You can't think you're going in alone," he says tightly.

"I have to."

It's a simple declaration. An inevitable truth they both regret, but he knows the picture they've painted as well as she does: Haynes is paranoid. Aggrieved and entitled and volatile. There are a hundred reasons why it has to be her and her alone who goes in.

"Beckett." He bows his head, the battle won. He covers her hand with his. Takes it reverently between his own. "Kate."

They're suspended in the moment together. Thrumming. Vibrating. They're suspended just above "somewhere," but the world won't wait. It's not Ryan or Esposito this time. It's nothing but the totality of who they are. The work they do and the meaning they make out of chaos. It's nothing but the two of them this time.

"Careful," he says, his voice full to breaking. He takes a step closer, even though she would've sworn a moment ago there wasn't one between them to take. He takes a step closer, and his lips barely brush her cheek. His forehead barely comes to rest against hers. "You have to be so careful, ok?'

"I will," she promises, meaning it. Swearing it. "I'll be careful."

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ugh.


	11. Tether—Rectification

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She doesn't hate Naked Heat. It was easier when she did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is early Season 3.

She doesn't hate _Naked Heat._ It was easier when she did. It seemed easier, anyway, and sometimes she tries to go back. Sometimes she digs out the first copy she bought—the one with the terrible, generic signature she got from a stack in some chain bookstore—and she tries to remember what it was like to be furious. To be blindingly angry. To be over him.

But she isn’t any more. Furious. Angry. Mostly she isn’t. 

Over him. That's another story entirely.

He annoys her. He charms her and surprises her. He makes her think, and he makes her laugh until her sides hurt.

He fits. The precinct. The passenger seat of her car. The space next to her on the desk in front of the murder board.

He fits, and it’s like she’s been knocking around the too-empty box of her own life for months, barking her shins and stubbing her toes on nothing. Curling up small to protect the vital parts of her when the whole thing goes tumbling. 

It's not really any good, trying to hate the damned book, but it's not easy to like it, either. It's not easy to read his version of what it was like for her last summer, when she banished him. It’s not easy to admit that he took their rift to heart and missed her— _badly_ missed her. It’s not easy the way _then_ keeps getting mixed up with _now,_ because he's with Gina. She _knows_ he's with Gina.

Except he isn't in the book, and honestly, there’s not a lot of evidence he’s with her in the here and now. It’s the same old easy rhythm between them when she’s caught a body and she calls 

_Castle._

_Beckett._

_Body?_

And she hears the click of a pen. The scratch of ballpoint on paper, whether it's late at night or earlier than early, he answers right away. Half a ring or less, and he's there every time, ready to work, and how does _that_ work with the ex-wife-slash-publisher-slash-current-girlfriend in the mix? How does that work with Gina? 

She looks for clues in the book she wants badly to hate. She skims. Flips back and forth through sections—something she _never_ does—combing through for any mention of fans and their chests. Hookers with a heart of gold, and yeah, there's a nod to that, but it's more about Nikki's indifference than anything. Beyond that, there's nothing. No Hollywood starlets eager to hitch their wagon to Rook's star. There's no ex dangling on the thin line between love and hate. 

He's with Gina. He's _been_ _with_ Gina all summer, but Rook only has eyes for Nikki.   

* * *

She resorts to taking the book out with her. Reading in public as though the company of strangers can unravel this. The intimacy of a love letter he has no business writing, when he’s all over the papers with a glossy, glittering blonde on his arm. 

She takes it out with her and reads in coffeehouse windows with sunshine streaming in. She reads by dusty bare bulbs at the back of bars. She reads on the subway and on park benches as fall well and truly settles on the city. 

It works, whatever that means. It works after a fashion. 

She manages to lose herself in the mystery. In the pace and characters and the harrowing danger he gets Nikki into, and the way she gets herself out of it. She bites her nails and can’t turn the pages fast enough. She laughs out loud and rolls her eyes. She blushes at the love scene and lingers over the sweeter moments between them. Nikki and Rook. 

She misses her stop. She lets her coffee grow cold and her beer go warm and flat. She drops back in time. Ten years and more to when Derrick Storm kept her company through sleepless nights. Through unimaginable grief.  

She loses herself in what he meant to her before she knew what he _could_ mean. What he might have meant, if only. 

If only. 

* * *

She forgets she has the damned thing with her. That’s how thoroughly she loses herself. She _forgets,_ and they’ve fallen so completely into old habits that she doesn’t think twice when he rolls open the big bottom drawer of her steel case desk at the end of the day, and there it is, spilling out of her bag. 

“You’re reading it.” He plucks it from the bottomless reaches. 

He runs a thumb over the worn corner of the dust jacket and peeks beneath to see whether the spine is cracked or not. The gestures are familiar, down to the firm tug he gives the cardboard slip she’s using a book mark to make sure it doesn’t slide free. 

They’re the gestures of someone who _reads,_ who loves that she reads, and she’s flooded with the memory of the dozen times they’ve tossed literary allusions back and forth. The dozen times they’ve beaten back the tedium of a stakeout—of waiting on warrant, of the _job—_ talking about books and plays and articles. 

They’re the gestures of a kindred spirit she likes and she’s missed and she’s still mad at, even if she’s not furious any more. She’s mostly not furious. 

“It passes the time.” She snatches it back from him. She slams it on to the desk and turns away. She busies herself with her coat and gloves and things on her blotter that don’t need straightening, but her cheeks are hot, and her mouth is suddenly dry, and she needs cover. 

"How . . . how far have you gotten?" 

He asks so timidly that she can’t help but turn toward him. His arms are at his sides. His hands are still. Pointedly still. 

It’s such an unexpected moment. They’ve been sailing along like Demming never happened. Like Gina doesn’t exist, and he never left. They’ve been sailing along, and she doesn't know how to answer. How far has she gotten? 

_Nowhere._

_The whole way through and back again._

They're both true, and neither is. 

"He says he's sorry,” she finds herself saying. She reaches out toward the cast-off book. She chafes the bookmark with her thumb and taps it more firmly between the pages. "She believes him." 

"She does," he says, and it's not quite a question. Not quite a statement, either. His eyes drop to the floor. To the bag still tipped on its side in the drawer. "I wrote that . . . so many times. Still writing it.”

He looks up again. Catches her corner-of-the-eye glance with his own, and whatever humor there might have been in the moment is gone. Whatever wry nod he might've meant to make to her tendency to make him squirm—his willingness to let her—caves in on itself. 

They're looking at each other, dead on. A charged moment and he forges ahead, words tumbling quickly out between them. 

"Still," he says, an emphatic continuation, and something altogether new. A conversation they’ve never had. A conversation they should have had. He’s never apologized, exactly. She never has, and neither one of them has done much in the way of acceptance. It’s not like it was last year. It’s nothing like that, and she feels the empty space. He feels it. ”It’s like I don't know him. The guy who listened to that story  . . . " His jaw clenches. "The guy who'd do that. The one thing you asked him not to do.” 

He deflates, suddenly. Maybe it's her silence, or maybe it’s the not-silence of the bullpen. Maybe moments just end, and she’s not here to absolve him, but the two of them are more than the wounds they’ve inflicted on one another. They’re more than sins of commission and omission, and she’s missed him. 

“He says he’s sorry,” she says again. She scoops up the book. She hoists her bag on to her shoulder and tucks it inside. She tips her head toward the elevator, and they fall in step. “She believes him.”  

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A while ago, I wrote a story (or Hunsdon did, anyway) called Tether—Realignment (http://archiveofourown.org/works/4138341/chapters/9333207). I had an AU end point in mind for that, and I’d hoped I would be able to write a few stories in between to get to that end point. It wasn’t to be, but I had started this one, so I thought I’d “finish” it. 


	12. Maybe, Baby

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Aunt Beckett, I have bad news." he says solemnly. "Sarah Grace is not a baby.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is AU S8. Kate is a Captain, but XX and XY never happened. 

 

 

The evening traffic is terrible. She shouldn't have driven. Wouldn't have driven, except she's laden down with things she's already late in bringing home. 

 _Essential_ things, if he's to be believed, which he isn't, in general, but she hurries anyway. She throws the car into park and juggles keys and store bags and her overstuffed briefcase. She slams the car door, then has to wrestle it open again when it turns out she's slammed the belt of her coat inside. 

She hurries to the elevator and jams on the button. She hurries down the hall, and in her eagerness, ends up dropping her keys somewhere in the depths of one bag of Essentials. 

"God d—" 

She breaks off, mid-curse, as the door swings open to reveal Castle, stone faced and serious. Filling the doorway entirely, and blocking her view of the loft beyond. 

"Aunt Beckett, I have bad news." he says solemnly. "Sarah Grace is _not_ a baby."

Something slams into his leg hard enough to jolt him. The tiny blonde in question pushes him to the side. She faces Kate with her hands on her hips. 

"Not a _baby!_ " 

“Well.” She meets his eye. Sees the barely suppressed smile and takes up his solemn tone. “That changes things.”

“It certainly does.” He takes one bag from her, then another, and sets them by the stairs. He takes her coat and presses a kiss to her cheek. A quiet chuckle and a whisper of encouragement in her ear.

Sarah Grace scurries around him, hiding behind his legs and peering up at Kate. It’s a familiar rhythm; the little girl is as curiously shy as she is bold. As skittish and in awe of “Aunt Beckett” now as Kate knows she would have been of Castle half an hour ago when Jenny and Kevin dropped her off. 

“I just don’t know what we’re going to do with her.” 

His voice is muffled by the coats in the front hall closet. It’s drowned out by the deliberate clang of coat hangers, and Kate knows its her cue. She crouches to bring herself eye level with the wide blue eyes. 

“We thought we were babysitting,” she says in a stage whisper.

“ ‘m not a baby.” 

Sarah Grace doesn’t sound nearly as certain now. Her lip quivers and Kate almost panics, but Castle’s done with his stage business. He turns from the closet with a flourish. 

“That’s the problem.” He produces something from his shirt pocket with a flourish. “I had a list. A sure-fire babysitting list!” He clears his throat theatrically and reads as he strides across the room, scooping up the bags in his free hand as he goes. “One. Hold baby. Two. Play with baby. Three. Nibble baby toes.” 

“Toes are _icky_.” Sarah Grace shouts after him. 

“Totally icky,” Kate agrees. She straightens and reaches a hand down. Sarah Grace takes it timidly, and they trail after Castle toward the kitchen. 

“Have you even _tried_ baby toes?” He plumps the bags on the counter. “Have either of you even tried? Baby toes happen to be delicious with remoulade.” 

“ _Icky!_ ” Sarah Grace declares again as she scales the stool of the breakfast bar with alarming confidence. “He not nibble _my_ toes,” she tells Kate in no uncertain tones.  

“Well, no,” Kate agrees. She kicks off her heels and winds her calves around the base of the stool. She plants her elbows on the counter and leans in conspiratorially. “Because you’re not a baby.” 

“So do we send her out to work?” Castle leans in, too. He barges in on the party. “If she’s not a baby, she has to earn her keep, right?” 

“Daddies work and Mommies work,” she informs him. “I too little to work.” 

“Too little?” Kate opens her eyes wide. She levels a palm between Sarah’s head and her own. “You’re as tall as me, aren’t you?” 

“I on a _chair!”_ She laughs uproariously. She wriggles her way on to her knees and sits up tall. “I bigger than you, Aunt Beckett. I _bigger_.” 

“She’s got you there, Aunt Beckett.” He shoots her a sideways smile, then sighs. He lets his shoulders sag. “And now I _really_ don’t know what to do with her. Not with such a big girl.” 

“Maybe there’s something in the bags.” Kate reaches for the one nearest to her. The little girl’s eyes gleam as she hears the clank and rattle and rustle of hidden things. “But it might be all baby stuff.” She takes a dramatic pause, holding the bag closed. “Uncle Rick picked it out.” 

“I see?” Sarah Grace turns her face up. She holds her hands out, her attitude somewhere between imperious and pleading. “I check. Him have all the baby stuff.” 

“Hear that, Castle?” Kate grins at him. “You have _all_ the baby stuff.” 

 

 

* * *

 

 

The bags are full of essentials, it turns out. Of course it turns out that way.

“This for _babies._ ” Sarah Grace declares, sliding a pack of princess masks across the counter to Castle. “Monsters,” she says reverently, keeping that pack for herself. “Aunt Beckett have robots.” 

Sequins are for babies. Castle ends up with more than a few stuck to his arms, his cheeks, the tip of his nose, for a while. Ribbon is _not_ for babies, and neither is glitter glue _._ Kate ends up with _both_ in her hair, and it’s nothing short of a miracle that Sarah Grace _doesn’t._ That she stays clean or nearly so. 

When she tires of paint and glue and glitter, there’s a shower of books in the bottom of the bag. They move to the living room. They spread blankets and sprawl out on the floor. Sarah Grace piles up the blocky board books by Castle. 

  
“For _babies_ ,” she says and stares him down until he pretends to read. 

“You read me this.” She thrusts something at Kate. She clambers her way into her lap and rests her head against Kate’s shoulder. “Please you read me, Aunt Beckett?” 

“I read you,” Kate says, scrambling to mask her own surprise. Her own unexpected pleasure at the gesture. At the whole night. “I read.” 

She falls asleep like that. Sarah Grace does, and Kate very nearly does. It’s hypnotic. The warmth of a little body growing heavy against hers. The rhythm of simple poetry. 

“She’s out?” Castle asks quietly. 

“Out,” she repeats, inhaling sharply. She’d been so nearly asleep. “Definitely out.” 

“Good job.” He hauls himself to his knees. “We should put her down upstairs.” 

“In a minute,” she says. Her arms tighten around the girl. Her hand strokes the blonde head, heavy against her ribs. “Just a minute.” 

“Ok.” He settles in next to her. Slides his arms behind her shoulders and tips his head against hers. 

It’s a lovely restful moment, ink-stained and sticky as she is. Aching with the hard corner of the chair at her back and hours spent on an unforgiving floor, answering a million and one questions. It’s a lovely, restful moment. 

“Still not  a baby person,” she says. She draws her knee up to nudge his thigh. “So there.” 

“Definitely not a baby person,” he agrees. “But they grow up.”  

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gluuurrrggggggg


	13. Every Minute

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The table erupts in laughter. In fury, and half the bar turns toward them, wondering if they should worry. But Beckett throws her head back, then. She holds her stomach and gasps with laughter. Ryan slaps a palm hard enough to make their drinks slosh in their half-empty glasses, and strangers turn away smiling.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Episode tag for The Double Down (2 x 02) 

 

"Ferret fear," Castle sits back, with his arms folded, the picture of absolute smugness. 

The table erupts in laughter. In fury, and half the bar turns toward them, wondering if they should worry. But Beckett throws her head back, then. She holds her stomach and gasps with laughter. Ryan slaps a palm hard enough to make their drinks slosh in their half-empty glasses, and strangers turn away smiling. 

"Ferret fear! What?" Esposito sputters. "Like that's a thing?" 

"For _you_ it is." Ryan kicks his partner under the table. "I swear. You guys should've heard his soprano." 

"Come on, Espo," Kate goads, "give it to us right here. That high note." 

"Don't you tell me it's just me." Esposito scowls. He gestures broadly with his beer. "Any one of you sees one of those beady-eyed little bastards running for your pant leg . . ." He's affronted. Bristling and none too happy with Castle. "Ferret fear." 

"I just call 'em as I see 'em."  He raises his palms in a gesture of self-defense. "The world's an open book to me." 

He's not sure how he's managed to become the evening's entertainment. He's not at all sure it's a good idea, this little game, but the alcohol has been flowing as freely as the trash talk, and this is where they are.

And it's good. He thinks it's good, even though he's come in for his share of abuse. For Esposito's muttered insults and Ryan's increasingly poor aim with wadded up cocktail napkins. He's been on the receiving end of Beckett's near-constant eye rolls and the way she smirks into her low-ball glass, totally unimpressed with his little parlor game. 

It's penance, he figures, and he's mostly glad enough to pay. He's mostly glad to take his lumps if it means they get to be _them_ again. The four of them, but him and her—Castle and Beckett—too. He's mostly glad, until it all suddenly turns dangerous. 

"Now do Beckett." Esposito puffs out his chest as he says it. He jerks his chin defiantly in her direction, well aware of the shit he's stirring. 

"Ooooh, yeah." Ryan sucks in a breath. He looks around the table, half afraid, half exhilarated. "Beckett fun fact! C'mon. Only fair!"  

Castle's eyes find hers. They meet a look that's somewhere between cool indifference  and steely warning, but it's already popped into his mind. It's already most of the way out of his mouth before he can think better of it. 

"Girl Scout," he says with absolute authority. "Long time Girl Scout." 

He holds her gaze and he knows she knows. She knows she's the one who outed herself. He sees the working of her jaw and the flash of memory. 

 _Girl Scout cookies are sold in February._  

She remembers the jab of her own finger and the snap of each consonant. The way they gave the words weight. She _knows,_ but she toughs it out. 

"Girl Scout." She takes a long sip of scotch. "Really?" 

It's not exactly a denial. It's most definitely a challenge, and it sparks something almost certainly unhealthy in him. It touches a match to the alcohol running through his veins, and at that particular moment, he does not care how many years he might be shaving off his own life. 

"Girl Scout," he repeats. "Just one of the small, rapidly growing treasure trove of things I can say definitively about Detective Kate Beckett. She. Was. A. Girl. Scout." 

"No way," Esposito tosses back the rest of his beer and looks around for the waitress. 

"Can't see it," Ryan agrees. 

"I can _make_ you see it, gentlemen." Castle makes a single gesture and the bar maid magically appears with another round. Esposito shoots him a sour look, but he's not annoyed enough not to take the drink "First, the direct evidence. The certainty—the passion—of her earlier assertion: 'Girl Scout cookies are sold in February'."

"Everyone knows that," Beckett retorts. 

She wishes she hadn't. She wishes she could take it back, and he can tell. Esposito can’t. Ryan can’t. But he can tell. 

“Some people know that,” he says, riding the wave that might well get him killed. “Addicts and aficionados. But the conviction, Detective, the immediacy. This is not some fun fact you picked up at your local's trivia night.”

“Maybe she just hates buying them,” Ryan wrinkles his nose. “Between cookies and band candy and those dumb magazine subscriptions . . .”

“Parents’ll bleed you dry.” Esposito clinks the neck of his beer against Ryan’s. “That it, Beckett? You ducking Hauser come cookie time?”

Castle leans in before she can answer. He plants his elbows on the table. “Oh, no. No, no, no . . . the good detective knows her Girl Scout cookies. She has intimate knowledge . . .”

"Intimate?" She says it practically to him. She cocks an eyebrow and swirls her drink and the game gets more dangerous still. 

"Ew. Crumbs," Ryan mutters, but it's all background. Whatever he and Esposito are tossing back and forth is miles away. 

"Intimate," he says right back to her. "I can see it. Last year's badge for top seller on your sash. But you wouldn't go door to door." 

"Nah. She'd have her mom and dad shake down the partners." That's Esposito. 

"The poor, low man on the totem pole," Ryan adds.

"Not the Beckett work ethic." Castle ignores them. Doesn't even have to ignore them. His eyes are fixed on her, his confidence absolute as he shakes his head. "Not now, not then. Sh might have . . ." He warms to an idea. Studies her and sees something wary that makes him think he's on to something. "Yes . . . I think 1989 Beckett might have set up shop at one of her parents' firms. A neat little table in the reception area. Artfully arranged pyramids of samoas and tagalongs. Not thin mints. Those sell themselves . . ." 

"Oh my god. She must've had the hat." Ryan tips his head sideways, his face screwing up tight as he tries to picture it.

"And those knee socks." Esposito gets a sharp, swift kick to the shin for his trouble. 

"And _that's_ enough of that." She digs in her bag and comes up with a fistful of bills. She tosses them down and pushes back from the sticky table.

Castle is after her like a shot. He's half worried she's going away mad. Mostly sorry that she's going away at all, so he's after her, money in hand. 

"Beckett." He waves the bills in her general direction. "Come on. I said my treat before. Drinks are on me." 

"Oh, that's not for drinks, Castle." She stops. She doesn't turn toward him, but she stops. "For the cold reading." 

"It's only a cold reading if you don't know the person." 

His tongue runs  ahead of his brain, as usual.  She does turn then. She spins on her heel. 

"And you think you know me?" 

She squares her shoulders. She pins him in place with a glare, but there's enough Dutch courage in him tonight that, for once, he stands his ground. For once, he doesn't flinch. 

"Yeah, I do." He meets her stare. He blinks first, but damn it, he _meets_ it. "Better than I did the first time." 

He's mumbling. He's looking at his shoes, burning at the not-quite welcome memory of her eyes shining bright with inaccessible tears. 

_Cute trick. Don't think you know me._

"Think again, Castle." 

She leans in close as she says it. Deliberately, maddeningly close. He has the sudden panicked, jubilant suspicion that she might kiss him, but she doesn't. Of course she doesn't. She plucks the wad of bills from his hand. She leans in closer still, her lips brushing his ear. 

"Top seller five years running," she breathes, and then she's gone.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A million years ago, I started writing a chapter of Material Witness with Girl Scout Cookies, but it never worked. I then (kind of) turned it into a chapter of  “All She Wants Is,” but I had this stub, which I reworked entirely into a team scene of sorts. Also, the beginning is obviously a shout out to Muppet47's brilliant "The Waiting Game"


	14. Sometime Soon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “We could be each other’s plus one.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have written myself into a corner a bit with this. It has a second half, or it should. It’s based on a prompt someone gave me a long while ago, which I don’t want to relay at the moment. This piece can stand on its own. I hope before the month is out to write the follow-up though.

 

 

* * *

 

“He’s like . . .  Peter Pan.”  Castle’s eyes follow Ryan as he flits around the bullpen, handing out thick, cream envelopes. His tone is taunting. It's derisive, but there's a kind of fondness underneath. Something that grows warm as his gaze shifts toward her. "A grumpy, hen-pecked Peter Pan."

“He’s excited” she says. She thinks she says. She smiles at him. At Castle, because Detective Beckett ought to frown on whatever Ryan's doing. She's officially bound to disapprove. But she smiles  in Castle's general direction, and she knows without really looking—without really _having_ to look, these days—that he's smiling back. An adorable, side-eye thing that makes her blood gallop. "It’s sweet.”

"Sweet." Esposito steps in between the two of them. He scowls, completely oblivious to whatever he’s interrupted. As usual. "Nasty," he says. “Sad."

He flicks a glance toward Castle, fully expecting backup. Expecting a fist bump or an Amen, because he's absolutely confident that any reasonable, red-blooded guy would agree. But he walks away without either. He walks away missing entirely the fact that Castle doesn’t agree. That whatever he opened with—whatever shade he might’ve thrown in Ryan’s direction to start—sad isn’t the word for it, as far as he’s concerned.

"For you. And for you." Ryan drops an envelope in her hands, then Castle's. His face softens, and his eyes shine. "It means a lot to Jenny and me to have you guys there."

"Are you kidding? Wouldn't miss it, Kevin." She gives his hand a squeeze.

"Not for the world." Castle beams. He gives up all pretense and just _beams._

She looks away. Looks down quickly before she's beaming, too. She runs her fingers over the good, heavy paper. Over the wax seal with their initials and a Celtic knot. She flips the envelope over to admire the calligraphy, and her heart stops.

"Ms. Katherine Beckett and guest," Castle reads aloud over her shoulder, his voice going blank with surprise as word follows word. His gaze darts darts down to his own envelope. To the the same two heart-stopping words on his own. "And guest."

"Are you . . ." She swallows hard. Feels dizzy. "Are you bringing a date?"

"No!" he says quickly. Forcefully. "I don't . . ." He steals a sidelong glance at her. "I'm not . . . Solo. Definitely going solo."

"Me too," she says, stepping on the end of his sentence. "I don't, either."

He lets out a breath. His brow unknits, but not quite. Not before something wistful flickers across his face, and it propels her. It sends her tumbling forward into the next moment.

"Unless . . ." She stalls out. Her tongue is absolutely dry, and she can't get any breath.

"Unless?" He regards her carefully. Guardedly, and that decides her.

"We could be each other's plus one." She doesn't mean to glare. She really doesn't, but it's fight or flight, and her default is glare.

"Yeah." He doesn't seem to mind. He's beaming at her. Smiling wide. "Yes. Yeah."

 

* * *

 

 

She thinks it's the stupidest thing she's ever done. There's an afterglow that lasts about a minute—half a minute—and then she thinks it's the stupidest thing she's ever done.

_"You need a dress."_

Lanie doesn't bother with a hello. She doesn't both beating around the bush, or pretending that the whole damned world doesn't know that she and Castle are going to the wedding together. Plus One and Plus One. She doesn't bother, and Kate can't believe she's been so stupid.

"I can't do it." Her voice is a whisper down the line. She's alone in the bullpen, but that's not what the whisper is about. "Lain . . ."

 _"Not unsupervised, you can't. That's for damned sure."_ Kate hears the riffling of pages. She pictures Lanie's neat spiral-bound calendar. Pictures her friend doing normal things, as if the sky isn't falling. _"I can chaperone Saturday."_

"Not the dress," she hisses. "This. It . . ."

 _"Him?"_ She's enjoying this way too much. She's entirely too amused. _"Hasn't been that long since Josh. And I'm guessing Castle won't mind training wheels . . . "_

"I am _not_ doing _him!"_ . . .  and now she's shouting. She's pacing and gesturing and the overnight cleaning staff are giving her wide berth, but she can't seem to tone it down. "I'm not _ready_ to do him. That's the whole point. I can't _do this!"_

 _"But you want to do him,"_ Lanie replies calmly. _"You're practically ready to do him. Isn't that the whole point?"_

"Yes?" She stares at the phone in her hand like it's the one asking the questions. "I mean. I think so? Lain . . . I don't know what I was thinking. What am I gonna do?"

 _"Find a dress that says 'do me sometime soon'."_ Her tone brooks no argument. _"And for services rendered, you buy me lunch."_

 

* * *

 

It's too much. The dress, when she finds it, is way too much, but she's already found it. She's already run her hands down the midnight black velvet skirt and snapped the fabric to make the train flare out. And Lanie had noticed. Of course she’d noticed.

“Try it.” She shoves it into Kate’s arms and closes herself on the other side of the fitting room door. "Don't start. Just try it."

"It's a Sunday afternoon wedding!" Kate protests. She stands there in the shitty fluorescent light with the dress clutched awkwardly to her midsection. She's half undressed. Entirely surrounded by herself thanks to the trifold mirror. Thanks to the stupid pedestal. "This is black tie. This is . . ."

"The kind of dress you, girlfriend, are going need once you're doing Richard Castle on the regular," she calls through the door.  

"I am _not—_ "

"Giving you 45 seconds, before I come in there and _put_ you in that dress, Beckett."

She's serious. Dangerously serious, and there's not a doubt in Kate's mind that she means it. She shrugs the rest of the way out of her blouse. She peels off her jeans and steps into the damned thing, because she can't bear to do otherwise. She can't bear to be so exposed.

She works the zipper up as high as she can. It's not all the way. It's not even close before the muscles across her chest are singing with pain, but her time is up.

"Good _lord."_ Lanie lets out a low whistle as she slips through the louvered door. "Kate, that is . . ." She approaches. Circles, and Kate's heart is pounding. She's light-headed. "Well you can't even see with that ratty-ass, laundry-day bra peeking over the top. Let me just . . . "

"No!" she snaps. Her hands fly to the center of her chest. They press hard at her searing ribs. "It shows." She's gasping. Near sobbing. "It'll _show."_

"The scar." Lanie's hands land on her shoulders. She swims into focus through Kate's tears. "Honey. You two do this—and you should do it." Her voice goes from gentle to steely, with a sly smile underneath. "You're _gonna_ do it. And when you do, it's going to show." She drops her hands to the zipper. She eases it upward and slides the bra straps down, tucking them under the dress's off-the-shoulder neckline. "His, too. You know that right?"

"I know." She says, not looking up. Not able to look at all. "But, Lanie . . ."

"No buts." Lanie steps backward off the platform. "Look, Kate. Just you look."

She does. She looks, and it's all flaws at first. It's the too-prominent collar bones, and the harsh shadows of hollow cheeks. It's the fact that she's too thin, too pale, too worn-looking. It's the pocked, puckered crescent of the scar at first.

But her hands smooth down the bodice. They slide over the curve of her hips. She turns and her hair sweeps over one shoulder. She catches a glimpse of someone else in profile. She catches a glimpse of what could be.

She looks, and she catches a glimpse of _sometime soon_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope this stands well enough on its own.


	15. Die Trying

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “He just wants out.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Miserable episode insert for Headhunters (4 x 21) 

 

 

He wants out. 

The realization drops heavy in the pit of his stomach. It’s the child of time and weariness. Despair. Nothing at all to do with the burn of alcohol, though _that_ slides steadily down. A best effort to fill the hole, but it won't. It can't, any more than Jacinda or Vegas or his sad attempt to slip back into a skin that's never fit particularly well. This callous, loud brand of masculinity. 

He's never been any good at it, and he should know by now there's a hole through the middle of him that nothing can fill. He’s outstripped Slaughter in this silent, mirthless celebration of lasting the whole day.  He's slammed more shot glasses on the bar than he can count, every single one upside down and drained dry. But he's emptier than ever.

He just wants _out_.  

* * *

 

 

It takes a literal turn. _Out._ There’s a window in the men’s room, and he might be drunker than he thought. Or more desperate, because he's thinking about it, and he shouldn't be. It’s small, that window. It’s _impossibly_ small, but he goes slack inside when he sees it. When he realizes that the stall hides it. Most of it anyway. He goes slack with short-lived relief. 

 _That’s_ alcohol. Pointless relief, because he’ll never make it through, and it’s not the kind of _out_ he means anyway. There's no release, metaphorical or otherwise, to be found in scraping the skin from the whole front of his body. 

But his feet don’t seem to know that. They don’t seem to accept either part, and they’re clumsy. They miss the edge of the toilet when he lifts his knee the first time, the second time, the third time. The ringing percussion when he tries for the radiator cover jutting from the wall instead makes his head ache. The soles of his shoes scrape out a glissando against the slats of the vent again and again until he actually finds purchase. 

He’ll _never_ make it. He’s still telling himself that as he hauls his body upward. He ducks his head as though that will help. As though it’ll make the window wider or taller or anything but impossible. As though it will make this idea any less stupid, and then he’s stuck. He’s wedged shoulder to shoulder with his head sticking out into the night, getting rained on. At least he hopes it's rain.

He gags on the foul, rusty smell of the alley. Panics when he hears heavy boots on metal above him. _Directly_ above. Low-voiced, rapid-fire Spanish. _Fire escape,_ he thinks. There must be one right above him, and he's _stuck_ now.  Right below whatever kind of deals go down on fire escapes in the rain. In this neighborhood at whatever ungodly hour it is. 

 _Neighborhood_. He doesn’t even know what neighborhood this is. Can’t remember anything other than clinging to the door of Slaughter’s Challenger, a sick feeling rising in him that had nothing to do with the physics of taking corners that fast. Nothing to do with Slaughter at all, though the thought of him is strangely motivating all of a sudden. 

The thought of Slaughter slamming his palm down on the bar again and again. The flat black of his eyes and the sudden image of him bursting into the filthy men’s room, plucking Castle from his awkward perch like a too-small child climbing the ladder of the big slide. It makes him angry or something like it. Something close enough to push off hard with his feet.

He hears the screech of metal on metal. It's the radiator cover giving way, he realizes too late. There's nothing but empty air beneath his feet and he almost falls back. Almost, but he pulls his knees up. They bang hard on the wall, agony spiraling out and up and down, but his toes find purchase. They find the window sill or a toehold in the filthy, crumbling wall, and he hurls himself forward.  

The squeal of metal and the scrabbling of his shoes give way to a rending sound.  There's a line of fire erupting all along his left arm, from shoulder to elbow and beyond. The ground comes up to meet him. To scour the heels of his hands and one cheek. A searing shock absorber that might well have saved his life, given the force of his temple slamming into the ground. 

But he’s out. He’s up. Dazed and energized, adrenaline setting his feet moving in a mostly straight line as the voices overhead come faster and angrier, but he’s gone. He’s _out_ and _away_ and headed nowhere. 

 

* * *

_Nowhere._

It’s what he tells himself as he walks and walks. The alcohol is a stale, sour taste at the back of his tongue. Home holds no appeal at the moment, and there's no place else he has to be.

 _Out,_ he thinks to himself trying to summon up some kind of satisfaction. It's what he wanted. What felt desperate and necessary enough to leave him tumbling out a filthy bathroom window into an even filthier alley, but there's no peace in it. 

"Castle?"

His name comes from somewhere behind him. Quite a ways behind him, and he forgets to be angry. He forgets to hate himself for the ease that settles over him at the sound of her voice. He forgets for a blissful moment that she doesn't love him, and he turns. 

"Beckett?" He peers into the darkness. Tips his head back and instantly regrets it for more reasons than he can count. The alcohol. The blood pounding, tight and hard behind his eyes. The building. _Her_ building, when he was supposed to be going nowhere. 

"Out," he murmurs, not quite to himself. "This isn't out." 

 

* * *

“Castle, what the hell?”

Her voice sounds clipped. Annoyed and brusque. She's proud of it. Would be proud of how dispassionate she sounds, if only she weren't rushing to him. If she weren't grabbing him by the lapels to swing him around into the light. If she weren't so blessedly relieved to have her hands on him after so many awful weeks of distance between them.  

"Did Slaughter do this?" She jerks at the flapping length of his sleeve. She hates this coat. The mottled topography of the thick leather and the way he’s been wearing it like armor. She's come to hate it, but now it's split from the shoulder seam almost to the elbow, and he's bleeding from a long gash.  He's down at least two shirt buttons from what she can see, and there's an angry, weeping scrape on his cheek. "Castle, did he attack . . ." 

“Window,” he mutters. “Climbed out a window. 

“What window? Where?” She’s trying to triage. Trying to get information out of him and not doing a good job of either. The cheek looks bad, but it’s probably fine, unless . . . “Your head. Did you hit your head?” She tugs on the fucking coat again. The smell of stale beer and worse almost chokes her, but she yanks the crown of his head down for a closer view. She skates her fingers along his hairline. Over his scalp, looking for cuts. Feeling for bumps or bruises. “Castle, I need to know if you . . .” 

“Stop,” he shouts suddenly. His fingers circle her wrists. A vice grip on both counts. “Beckett, _don’t_.” 

It’s a violent gesture. _Violent_. The word clangs painfully in her own head. It’s over in an instant. He lets go. He steps back so suddenly that it leaves him swaying. It leaves him with eyes open wide with shock. Self-loathing, but she can’t unsee the hard anger of a moment ago. The space he opens up between them doesn’t erase the the feel of her bones crunching in his grasp.

“What are you doing?” she chokes out. 

“Nothing,” he hisses. “I’m not doing _anything.”_ He looks up at the building. He looks up and down the street they’ve lingered on a thousand times before. “I wasn’t coming here. I wasn’t going anywhere. Storm the beaches . . .” He shakes his head hard. Quickly, and he’s swaying again. 

“Castle, you’re not making sense.”

He’s worrying her. _Really_ worrying, and she swallows down her hurt. The thousand cuts of the last few weeks. She swallows down her anger and the flash of fear— _fear_ —from an instant ago. She reaches out to steady him, but he bats her hands away, crying out at the contact.  

“ _God,_ I wouldn’t _do_ that.” He wrings his hands. Stares at them in horror and hides them behind his body. His face goes hard. Desolate. “I wouldn’t ever, Beckett.” 

He takes a step back. Another and another until there’s a full square of sidewalk open between them. She’s fixed in place. Miserable at the distance and powerless to close it.  

“I wouldn’t.” He stops, finally. He hangs his head. His shoulders slump and his arms are stiff and heavy at his sides. “But I won’t die trying.” 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My mind is a regrettably dark place a lot of the time . . . sorry.


	16. Odd Man Out

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “The pause ends. The moment when he might have ignored it all passes him by, and he finds himself face to face with Jim Beckett for the second time in too few days.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Episode insert for Rise (4 x 01). 

 

"Mr. Castle.”

There's a a pause. An insistent pause that draws Castle's eyes upward just when he'd rather be head down. When he'd rather stumble blindly down the sterile white hallway.

 _Do you mind if we don't?_  

He'd rather plow forward into anything other than this. Amnesia. Banishment. The enduring image of her, grey-faced and raw-voiced in a hospital bed and nothing to replace it. Nothing. 

"Rick."

The pause ends. The moment when he might have ignored it all passes him by, and he finds himself face to face with Jim Beckett for the second time in too few days. 

He should say something. He knows that. The man's lost his wife. Nearly lost his only child. Nearly witnessed her murder, and he knows he should say something. _I'm sorry. I tried. I love her._ He should say _something_. 

"Mr. Beckett." That's what comes out. The only thing that comes out, and his stomach lurches. "Jim."

He offers it by way of correction. By way of apology, but the wrung-out soul before him has no time for niceties. No time even for blame or castigation. 

"How is she," he asks, spine rigid. A brave front that’s unsustainable. His chin drops to his chest. He curls his trembling hands into fists and steels himself. He raises his eyes again, more weary than fearless. "How is she really?" 

"Josh," Castle says without meaning to. Certainly without wanting to. He looks at the molded plastic chairs. At the long hallway with just the one way out. The two of them must have missed each other, somehow. Her father. The man who managed to save her life. They must have just missed each other. "You would  have just passed him . . . "  

"Josh," Jim says, and it's almost absent.  Almost as if he's casting his mind far back, and Castle worries the shock of the last twenty-four hours has taken a worse toll than anyone realizes. He worries, but Jim looks up, keen, clear eyed, and wondering. "The doctor from yesterday."

"Yeah. Yes.” There’s a cold, trickling feeling in his gut. A sneaking, terrible suspicion not yet fully formed. “He’s on staff . . . I mean. Obviously, he is. You can probably page him, and he’ll be able to . . .” 

“I’m not looking for a medical update, son,” Jim says tersely. He fixes Castle with an expectant look, and there it is. 

He doesn’t know. He hasn’t the least idea who Josh is, and everything is suddenly, miserably, stunningly clear. Jim’s visit to the loft. The veiled conversation and the way he’d humbled himself. The raw, emotional plea. 

_She won't back down. Not unless someone can convince her that her life is worth more than her mother's death._

It’s a case of mistaken identity. A terrible sin of omission he hadn’t even realized he was committing. He hadn’t even realized. 

“S-, sir. I mean . . . Jim.” He stutters. He’s reeling. Racked with guilt, and bitterly disappointed. Heartsick and feeling like a fool—like _such_ a fool for the fantasies he’s harbored. For the hope that’s buoyed him up through everything until now. “Josh isn’t just Beck—. He isn’t just Kate’s doctor.”

He trails off. Cringes and glances over his shoulder as though she might appear suddenly, ready to kill them both for talking out of turn, but the hallway is empty. Everything is empty. 

“Oh,” Jim says, just when it seems the unbearable silence might stretch out forever. “I see.” 

“I’m sorry.” The apology comes spilling out, and he wonders what it’s for, other than everything. _Everything._ “I’m sorry about the scene yesterday.” 

“He blamed you.” 

The words are turned inward. He’s piecing things together. Castle sees that— _knows_ that—but in the moment, it sounds like the worst kind of indictment. 

“He’s not wrong. I started this.” He raises his eyes. He forces himself to look Jim—to look _her father_ —in the eye. “I started this, and when you came looking for the man who would . . . who _could . . .”_  

He surrenders in that moment. He feels every twinge and ache from the last few days. The strain across his shoulders from hauling her out of the hangar. A dozen sore places where her fists landed and a dozen more from launching himself at her in the cemetery. He feels ache and sting of bitter words between them and the cold weight of exile. 

“I tried. I _tried_ to make her see. But I’m not who you thought I was.” He shakes his head. He studies the blinding light bouncing off white floor tiles. “I’m sorry.” 

He should go. Honor her request and leave her father in peace. He should go back to the precinct and be useful. Make himself useful until he isn’t any more. At the very least, he should fucking go, but he can’t. He’s rooted to the spot. 

“I don’t have absolution in me, even if it were mine to give. Today?” His eyes travel up the hall. Castle’s follow, then fall away. “Today, with Katie in there like that, I don’t have it in me.” 

Castle nods silently. Miserably. He steps aside as Jim starts down the hallway, then stops.

“I can’t say I believe she’d have stayed away from her mother’s case for good if you hadn’t come along. I can’t say that she should have, even with this.” His jaw twitches. Castle sees a grim, familiar flash. Anger swallowed down just the way he recognizes. “Even with this.” 

His head bows of its own volition. The weight of his years and then some lie heavy on the man’s shoulders, but he bears up. He rouses himself, and he’s going. He seems to be going, but he pauses.

“I only get a little of her,” Jim says quietly. “Most days it feels like more than I deserve.” He lays a hand on Castle’s shoulder for the briefest of moments. “I only get a little. But there’s not a doubt in my mind, Rick. You’re the man I was looking for.” 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one was a slog . . .


	17. Redacted

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'm taking it back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok. This is complicated. 
> 
> I previously published the first 800 words of this as a chapter of "Smithereens," which was just fragments I had sitting around when the news of cancelation came down. That part is a tag for "Still" (5 x 22). I had the next 800 or so words written, but I knew that I wanted it to be part of a something longer. So I'm including those first 800 words (so they'll be familiar if you read Smithereens) plus the finished second leg. This is a slightly AU version of the end of Watershed (5 x 24) and beginning of Valkyrie (6 x 01). To make matters worse, this second leg employs a concept that I kind of already used in "Best in Show" (which is Chapter 6 of this story), because although the idea is one Brain!Poneh very stubbornly holds on to, I never thought I'd finish this story, so I squandered it. (I may have mentioned I have Watershed issues . . .) 
> 
> Tomorrow, I'll post the rest as NaFicWriMo 18, because otherwise the damned thing is way too long.

"I'm taking it back." 

The words grip something in him. They tug down. He thought she was asleep. 

( _He didn't really think so. He hoped. He hoped_.)

"You're awake." He lets his voice sound thick. Sleep or unshed tears. White-knuckled terror. The effect should be the same on the quality of sound. It’s all still breath and vibration, right? Constriction, and it’s not the time to fight against it. 

"You knew." She's scoffing. Chiding and fussing at him. It's weird.  “Just like I knew you were.” She hikes her knee higher and nestles further under his chin. It's definitely weird. “So, I’m taking it back." 

The words are exactly the same as the first time. Quiet, clear, and even. Decisive. The end of a conversation, not the beginning, and that means she wants something from him. Opposition or defiance, maybe. She’s counting on him to push. To take a nosy,  _noisy_ peek behind a definitely closed door. That's what she wants from him in this particular darkness. 

It’s what he gives, usually. It’s how this works between them. He's bad at denying her in the best of times, and this isn't. These aren't. 

She almost died. Try as he might, he can't think what's novel about that. It’s a terrible thing in and of itself, the fact that he can’t think why it’s worse than the ten times before. The twenty times that it’s almost been both of them, except this was stupid. Except this was some lunatic with a brain tumor. Nothing at all either of them had done. Nothing at all they could have seen coming, and she's still shaking from that terrible stillness. Her long, ready muscles are weary. Vibrating with a back-and-forth cry in her body. In his. Adrenaline and more. She's still shaking. She almost died. 

"Castle . . ." 

Her voice is serious now. Wounded, and the guilt is immediate. The sorrow of knowing it's he who's done this. It’s he who’s taken too long when she's still shaking and she wants him to ask. To not let it go.  

"You’re taking it back." He sounds calm as he shuffles their limbs. He rearranges their bodies beneath the sheets, calm and conversational, like he's mulling it over. Like he can’t think what she could possibly mean. "That nonsense about you not being into me way before I was into you?” It’s impressive. How light his voice is. The tinge of humor that’s not too much somehow. “No surprise there, Beckett. That was definitely not selling.”

"No." 

It’s a long time in coming, that  _No._  It’s emphatic and thick. Constricted, and there’s no mistaking why.  Not with a sudden, scalding shock of tears pooling in the hollow of his shoulder. 

"Kate.  _Kate!"_ He struggles, trying to get enough distance to see her face, but she's claw fingered and heavy. Shaking. 

"What I said," she chokes it out, again and again.

_What I said What I said What I said._

He holds her. Powerless to do more. Powerless all over again, he rocks her and breathes her name into the spaces in between.

_Kate. Shh._

She drags a hand across her face at last. She takes an unsteady breath that sounds half drowned and catches the front of his shirt in a fist.

"It was a terrible way . . . the first time?" She shakes her head.  "No. I take it back."

His mouth opens on nothing. On some kind of formless protest. But he feels it coiling in her again. Terror and adrenaline and fury. Tears, and he's bad at denying her. 

"You take it back," he says helplessly. “Ok. You take it back.” 

She calms immediately. Her limbs are slack, if not quite still, or maybe it’s his that aren’t. But she’s instantly, perfectly calm, as if this strange compact is all she needed to bring her rest. He won’t regret it. He can’t when the steady rise and fall of her ribs beneath his palm feels like all he wants in the world. He doesn’t regret it, and still it feels like no good deed unpunished. 

She takes it back, and it can’t help but sting. 

"It'll be better,” she says softly. She lifts a steady hand and combs her fingers through his hair. 

It’s an apology he hates himself for needing.   "It'll be the best first time."

"The best first time," he echoes. There's nothing else he can do, so he tries to mean it. He does mean it, or some future version of him might, anyway. 

"But you know, right?" Her voice is thick again, but this time it's sleep and nothing else. This time, he feels the sweep of her lashes against his skin as sleep comes for her.  A lone mercy. 

"I know," he tells the darkness. "I know."

  

* * *

 

By rights it should be a joke between them. 

_I take it back._

That’s what should come of it, but they lose their way. She lies. She sets them up for a fall, and it’s nothing like a joke. 

There’s nothing to it for her. 

_Rick. I love you._

It was never more than terror in her mouth. _Maybe . . . Someday . . . If . . ._ At best, that's all it ever was. That's what he thinks as the boarding pass flutters from his hand. She's closed-off. All hard angles before him, she sets down the knife on the kitchen counter and says it's not about them. Says it's _her_ life. 

He's heard those particular words too many times, right in this very spot. Too many variations on a theme, and now this. The thing that should have been a joke. 

_I take it back._

It hones his fury to a keen edge. It carries him out the door. 

It carries him away. 

 

* * *

He's relieved. A bleak, terrible part of him is content to have every one of his worst fears confirmed. Fury is so much more _restful_ than fear. So much safer than truly wanting something. Someone. Her.  

It feeds itself, after all. _Fury_. It devours everything in him. All the fear from the very start that this day would come. Fear even as he watched her sleep while the storm raged outside. Fury devours it. Fury devours even despair. Certainty that he’ll never recover from this, never be over her. It devours all the love he bears her in its infinite forms. Fury devours it all. 

It burns hot and bright and roars so loudly he can hardly hear when she calls. He can hardly _think._ He parrots her. 

_We need to talk._

_Yeah, we do._

He hangs up the phone knowing one thing: He wants her to hurt. He wants to be the cause of it. The thought arrives, fully formed, and it's too awful—too sick-making—even for this kind of scorched-earth anger. Even for fury. But it's true, even so. It's true, even though his knees buckle and he has to catch himself hard on the corner of the desk.

He wants—just once—for _her_ to be the broken-hearted one. 

He wants to hurt her, and he will. It's not a vow to himself. There's no satisfaction in it. It's just a fact. 

He pockets the ring and goes to meet the end. 

 

* * *

 

She looks defeated. He sees that from her silhouette through the car window and in every measured step along the cracked-pavement path. He hears it in the not-quite-inaudible sigh just before her oh-so-careful apology. 

_I'm sorry I kept secrets._

He flares white at that. The urge finds new purpose just when the rest of him was softening. Bending toward her like green reaching for the sun. When even fury drew back in her presence, weak in the face of the all-encompassing truth that he _loves_ her.  

But the urge to hurt her flares white at the ground she won't give. It flares white at the fact that she won't name herself a liar. That she won't see this as the sequel to every one of their worst moments. Lie after lie. Omission after omission. Silence after silence. 

He wants to hurt her, and he does. He tells the truth.

_It's who you are._

She tries to stop him. She says his name, but he rolls over it. His voice is ice, and he's proud of it. Some nasty, clawing destructive part of him is proud that each and every word lands like a body blow.

He feels in his pocket for the ring. He grips it tight, and he's proud of that, too. The way the sensation is distant. Sharp pressure on calloused skin, like it's someone else's problem, and then he's on one knee. 

It hurts. Practically. Not distant. Not theoretical. The damned knee doesn't bend right yet, because it's too soon after being out of the brace. Because he's too old, and he can't even do _this_ right. He can't even ruin them without fucking it up. 

But that's what he came here to do, so he presses on. He says her name. Her full name, and he flashes on her slapping the driver's license out of his hand the first time he'd lifted her wallet. The first time she'd let him lift it, probably.

His knee throbs with the cold ground under it, and it's another flash. Her leaning over to scratch his toe for him. That breathtaking dress and the tipsy _oh_ of surprise when he'd slipped it down past her hips in the dark.   

It's constant then. A barrage of images. Kissing her like his life depended on it in the cold of a filthy alley. Holding her hand in the bank. The shocking heat of his own mouth on her rain-chilled skin. The weight and force and joy and solemnity of her, standing as still as she could in some madman's apartment, and using the last breath she might ever draw to say it. What he knew then. What he knows now. The truth fury can’t devour.  

_Rick. I love you._

It's constant, but he came here to ruin them. To make her be the one to say no. The one to admit this was never a possibility for her. _Never._ He came to meet the end and he doesn't know any way out but through now, so he goes on. 

_Will you marry me?_

* * *

 

_You're proposing._

It's shocked the first time. Absolutely, legitimately shocked, and for a moment, he’s shocked in turn. Because she _has_ to have known. Not the here and now of it, but the intention. The fact this is all he's wanted for _years._ How could she not have known?   

 _But_ _she didn’t._ Some would-be kindness whispers to him that the proof is right there in her wide eyes. That her lies are always sins of omission, and she’s no performer. It’s short-lived, though. That would-be kindness. Fury strikes it down. It hisses that she didn't _want_ to know. Denial like a skeleton key in her back pocket, and this is her big exit. 

_You're proposing._

It’s unbearably sad that second time. Tears spilling over her lashes, and there should be satisfaction in it. Fury ought to lap them up, but she looks through him, and he's weak. Miserably unhappy, because he came here to make her say no, but he'd give anything to hear her say yes. He wants her to say yes and mean it. 

"You're proposing," she says a third time and tips her face to the sky. She blinks back the tears and takes a long, painful breath. "No," she says and he's shattering. "No, you're not."

"Not?" He latches on to the last syllable. The reprieve of ambiguity.  

"You're not." She repeats it. Low and firm and unmistakable. It’s an order, not an answer.  "Take it back.”

 

* * *

“No.” His voice is flat as he hauls himself back up to sit in the swing. He stares at the ring in his palm, at the dark indentations from clutching it tight, like it’s somehow to blame. Like it’s driving him on. “I’m not taking it back. Just say it.” 

“Say what?” She sits again, too, and he can’t remember her standing. He can’t remember much of anything of the last few minutes. The last day.

“Say no and _end_ it, Kate.” The words feel strange now. They _sound_ strange, like the nightmare where he takes the stage. Where the lights come up and he's learned the wrong lines. 

Her mouth opens. The word rises swiftly. _No._ It rises, but she wrestles it down. “I’m not going to do that.” 

"Why?" It's a quiet question. Sincere, he finds. After all that fury. After certainty that he knew the worst of it, it's a sincere question. 

"Because you're not asking." It's ambiguous. Somewhere between an order and an unhappy statement of fact. "Because this is about . . . what I did." She stares at the ground. "I lied. I didn't just keep it from you. I lied." Her lips press together. It’s not an easy admission. Not easy at all "But I really thought . . . I wanted to have all the information before—" 

"—you wanted to control the situation," he shoots back.

"Oh, and you don't?" She hits out at his hand—at the ring—but he pulls it back. He pulls it away to minimum safe distance and her teeth flash. "This ultimatum isn't about control?" 

"What ultimatum?" he asks icily. "Exactly what part of 'whatever you decide' is an ultimatum?" 

"Come on, Castle. You find out I might have a job offer in another city, and you run out and buy a ring, and I'm supposed to—"

"Run _out_?" He's livid now. _Offended,_ and it's almost comical. "Look at it." He shoves the ring at her. "Take it." 

"I'm not taking it!" She pulls her hands clear. She tucks them behind her body, and now it really _is_ comical. 

"Then just look." He holds it up, feeling wicked. Feeling something other than all-consuming fury for the first time since he walked out of her apartment. He turns the ring this way and that so it catches the light. "Do you thing I ran out to Jared on the way here?" 

"How . . ." She can't look away. Can't keep one hand from creeping toward it, though she yanks the traitorous fingers back immediately. "How long have you . . ." Her breath hitches. "When did you get it?"

"I'm not saying." He disappears the ring. A rusty prestidigitation move, but effective enough. "'I'm not asking, remember?" 

Her teeth flash. She curses to herself. He feels a slightly sick swell of triumph or something like it. 

“Ok,” she says, finally. “You're asking. _"_ Her voice shakes. Her whole body shakes, and she's holding on the chains of the swings for dear life. "You're fucking _asking_."

"Well?" He's not pulling off casual. How could he be with the rush of the world turning in his ears? He’s not pulling of casual at all, but she doesn't seem to notice. 

"Well?" she echoes faintly. "What?"

"I'm asking." He doesn't bother with casual this time. His heart is pounding. His cheeks feel like they're on fire, and the ring is digging painfully— _painfully_ —into his palm as he clutches it tight. "Yes or no question, Beckett." 

"Yes?" She looks stunned by her own answer. Immobilized by it, and then she's all furious motion. She's launching herself at him. "Yes. God, you're such a _jerk._ Yes!" 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the weird cheat here. And sorry for misery three days in a row. I promise the conclusion is lighter.


	18. Revealed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "You should tell me now."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As promised, the second half of "Redacted," which was Chapter 17. This picks up immediately after the end of that.

"You should tell me now." The words snake across his bare chest. They're low and smoky in the streetlight pouring through the window of a room in some hotel neither of them knows the name of. They didn't make it to her place or his. They barely made it out of the cab. 

"Tell you what?" He overdoes the innocence. 

"When you got it." She drapes her left hand up over his shoulder. Wiggles her fingers for show. "How long you've had it." 

"Why should I tell you now?" He lifts her hand. Nips at her wrist, none too gently. 

She fights back. _Bites_ back And he feels desire rising again, as surely as the bruise blooming on his skin. 

"Because I said yes,” she purrs, fully aware of what she’s doing. Fully aware that he wants her even more fiercely, now that he has her.

“For yes, you got the ring." He bands his arm around her hips. He flips her beneath him and cages her against the bed with his body. He covers her mouth with his. Challenges her with his hunger until she moves beneath him, just as eager. "You'll have to work for the story." 

 

* * *

 

"You should tell me now." 

It's matter of fact, this time. It's stoic. They've both been stoic so far, but the question raises a grin for him. A playful, unexpected thing from her to him, and it lightens his heart.  

"Why should I tell you now?" He skims a palm over her cheek. Sweeps a lock of her hair behind one ear and tries to memorize this version of her. Buttoned down and serious in a new, tailored suit. Terrified and excited and desolate. He tries to file away this beautiful new version.

"Because I'm leaving." She breaks, but only a little. It's an airport lounge and all she'll allow herself is the faintest waver in her voice. The briefest lean into his body. 

"For that—" He cradles the back of her head. Presses a kiss to her hair, because it's all he can stand without losing it. Without the stoic facade absolutely crumbling. "For that, you have to come back."

 

* * *

 

"You should tell me now." 

It's not so playful this time. It's weary and worn down. It's apologetic and resentful. It's too many complicated things to decipher on the canvas of six square inches of a phone screen. 

"Why now?" He rolls on to his stomach and mashes his face into the pillow. He’s sulking and he knows it. Sulking and he hates himself for it, but it’s the third week in a row he was supposed to go there. She was supposed to be here. “Why should I tell you now?” 

“Because I miss you.” There’s an edge to her voice. She’s sulking, too. She’s frustrated and utterly exhausted by the job. By new weather and new streets. New people and new rhythms of life, and he wavers when she takes a shaky breath. He’ll tell her someday. He has no doubt of that, but so far, someday has been far, far off. Now, for the first time, he really wavers when she says, “Because this is hard.” 

He wavers, but the word choice catches him. He’s punch-drunk exhausted and he laughs. He scoops the phone up and brings it in close. He drops his voice to the deep, dark pitch that makes her laugh. Makes her toes curl. 

“Not that hard, Beckett.” He centers the phone on her pillow and runs a hand through his hair. He gives her an over-the-top smolder. “Maybe if it were _harder_ . . .” 

* * *

“Just tell me.” 

She’s gone through the stages of grief at least twice. At _least_ twice, though she keeps swinging back to anger. The scotch is helping with that, and maybe it shouldn’t be. Maybe he should be wrapping her up and nudging her to cry it out, rather than feeding the fire, pouring and pouring again.

“Why?” He pours again, but he catches her, too. He catches her as she stalks by and pulls her down with him. He sets the rocks glass firmly in her hand and swings her legs over his lap. He crashes his own drink against hers and takes a long swallow. “Why now?” 

“Because you’re stuck with me.” She jerks an elbow as though she’s going to knock the whole two fingers back at once, but the gesture fizzles out. Grief bleeds back in. Humiliation and self-recrimination, and she sips at it instead. She nurses it. “Because I lost my fucking _job_ and we’re not even gonna get to live in this great apartment—“ 

“You haven’t even seen the apartment.” He tugs at the hem of her sweater. He manhandles her a little bit, bringing her closer. “Maybe the apartment would have sucked.” 

“An apartment you picked out?” She snorts. Coughs as the liquor burns the rawness of her throat. “As if.” She kicks at him. Drums her heels against his thighs. “I’m miserable, Castle. Just tell me.” 

“Not when you’re miserable.” He takes the glass from her. He sets it aside along with his own. He takes her in his arms and slithers down so they’re stretched out along the couch, nose to nose and tangled up. “Can’t tell you a good story like that when you’re miserable.” 

* * *

 

He doesn’t tell her when they decide on September. 

“You lied to me.” She’s fierce and panting above him as she pins his wrists overhead. “You let him use us as bait. You owe me.” 

He doesn’t tell her, though. He pays his debt in full, but he doesn’t tell her then. 

He doesn’t tell her when she almost dies. When Vulcan Simmons has her, and her homecoming is nothing short of miracle, he doesn’t tell her, even with what might have been her last words clutched in his hand. Even with her fingerprint in blood, he doesn't tell her.

“I wanted to know,” she says in the middle of the night. Out of the blue after they’ve been huddled together in the darkness for hours. “I was so _pissed_ you never told me.” 

They laugh about it. They clutch at each other and shiver under the covers and sob through it, but he doesn’t tell her then. 

He doesn’t tell her when they finally get Bracken. When they’re finally home. When they peel off one another’s clothes and clamber into the tub together. When he gently washes her hair, mindful of the raw, jagged slash across her scalp that probably should have had stitches, he tells her tall tales and jokes and pretty lies. He tells her he loves her and how in awe of her he is—he’s always been—but he doesn’t tell her when he bought the ring. 

 

* * *

She doesn’t ask after he comes back. She doesn’t ask, and it wounds him. It cuts at the heart of him for weeks—for _weeks,_ but she marries him. They get married and when they’re finally alone, she tips her face up to his.

"You have to tell me now,” she says, her smile more dazzling than moonlight on the water.

“Have to, do I?” They sway together to music that’s long since fallen silent. “Why’s that?” 

“I’m your _wife_.” She pinches him hard. She runs a possessive hand down his chest. “You have to tell your wife things.” 

“Oh, I have lots of things to tell her.” He skims his fingers over the skin left bare by the open back of her pantsuit. “All kinds of things.” 

And he tells her. All kinds of things. But that’s not one of them. 

* * *

 

It’s never quite a ritual between them. She asks on her birthday. On his. On the anniversary of her mother’s death, with her freezing hand in his in front of the gravestone. On their anniversary and the anniversary of the storm. But she doesn't  always ask. Not every anniversary and not only then. 

She asks when he’s drunk and when he’s sleepy. When he’s distracted and when he has writer’s block. She asks when he’s giddy and silly, sliding around the loft in his socks aand dragging her along. She asks when he's amped up on caffeine, and she asks when he’s up in the middle of the night with something black and heavy hanging on this soul.  

She asks and he doesn’t tell. He dangles the possibility overhead and she snatches at it. She demands and cajoles and insists and lets him distract her. She lets him talk her out of it or barter for something else. Something better. 

She asks with her last ounce of strength and their newborn daughter resting on her chest. 

“You should _definitely_ tell me now,” she whispers, drifting in and out. Straining to keep her eyes open because she can’t understand how they made this beautiful, strange, red-faced, furious little miracle. “I had a person in there and that was _totally_ your fault.” 

“I’d tell you,” he says, hovering over them. Spreading his arms and arching his body as though to shelter the two of them. “I’d tell you, but I can’t take my eyes off her.” 

* * *

He doesn’t tell her when they bring Lily home. Not the first night or the second or the third. Not a week in, or even two. He tells her on no particular night. For no particular reason, other than it’s late, and she’s amazing. She’s beautiful and exhausted and she should have come back to bed an hour ago. 

“She cries every time I move.” The light from the hallway falls across their bodies as he cracks the door open. “Mad cry. I am never ever ever EVER going back to sleep cry.” 

“Sorry,” he breathes. He eases half on to the arm of the rocker. “Hand off?” 

“Almost time for her to eat again.” She shakes her head. Winces as the light hits her eyes. “You should sleep.” She sighs. A tear slips from beneath her lid. “One of us should sleep.” 

“Can’t sleep.” He strokes her hair. Strokes the fevered skin of her temples. “Lily wants a story.” 

“So this is your fault, too, huh?” She scowls at him. Presses a kiss into his palm. “Figures.” 

“Hey. It’s the kid’s fault.” He skates the pad of his thumb across the rosebud of the baby’s mouth. “Right, Lil?” 

She grunts. She screws up her face and turns into the wall of her mother’s chest.   

“That’s a yes,” Kate says tiredly. “She wants a story. I want a story.” 

“It’s a good one, Lil.” 

He settles in closer. He takes a deep breath to quiet the sudden flutter of nerves when the notion takes him. To tell her. To tell himself all over again. The flutter of nerves when he thinks how to draw it out. 

“It starts with a beautiful girl named Kyra . . .” 

 _“Kyra!”_ she shouts. Her eyes fly open. 

Lily opens her mouth and howls. He laughs. He reaches for the baby even as he slides into the rocker's extra wide seat and eases Kate half on to his lap. The fill the space, the three of them. A warm, soothing knot and Lily tires herself out soon enough. 

“Fucking _Kyra_ ,” she mutters. She elbows him, but there’s nothing to it. She’s exhausted. “You’re such a jerk.” 

“She says that a lot, Lil,” he cups a hand around the baby’s ear and whispers. “The bad word _and_ the other thing. She said that when she said yes . . .” 

“Because it’s true,” she mutters. “It’s always been true.” 

“Do you want to know or not?” He knocks his head against hers. “You’ve bugged me long enough.” 

“You’re serious.” She takes a sharp breath in. She goes still and won’t look at him. “Kyra . . .?” 

He nods, voice gone for the moment. Gone until he swallows hard at the memory. “Mama did _not_ like Kyra." 

"Kyra was fine," she grumbles. "I didn't like _you."_

"But she went to her wedding anyway," he ignores her. He goes on whispering in Lily's ear. "And she caught the bouquet, baby girl.” He smiles down at her. At both of them. Kate’s face is flushed. Her heart is pounding and her fingers are fisted around his t-shirt. “Kyra threw it right to her, and when you catch the bouquet, you have to get married.” Lily squawks exactly on cue and he laughs. He laughs and holds them both closer. “It’s a rule.” 

“You didn’t.” She finally steals a peek up at him. Her face is a picture. A scowl and the world’s widest smile are at war, and it’s an absolute picture. “You couldn’t have.” 

“I did, though.” He kisses the smile. He kisses the scowl. He kisses her breathless, then spares one for Lily as she flails with ruddy fists and her weird little paddle feet. “I did, Lil. I knew way back then—before then even—that I wanted to be the one. I couldn’t just let someone else marry Mama, so I went right out and bought a ring.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for being kind and supportive and putting up with UGGGGHHH three days in a row.


	19. From a Certain Point, Onward

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dinner isn't enough. Four dinners aren’t enough, but he shows up with them anyway when he comes to end it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Episode tag for Sucker Punch 2 x 13 

 

 

 

From a certain point onward, 

there is no turning back. 

That is the point 

to be reached. 

—Franz Kafka

* * *

 

 

Dinner isn't enough. Four dinners aren’t enough, but he shows up with them anyway when he comes to end it. 

_End it._

He feels sick when he says it, even in the safe confines of his own head. He feels sick, and four dinners seems like a spectacularly bad choice, especially when nothing could possibly be enough, but he soldiers on. He presses the button and waits for the elevator. He gets on and watches the doors close. He feels the push of gravity on his shoulders as the car rises. He hears the ding as the doors roll open again on four, and he tries, at every turn, not to think of it as the last time. 

He crosses the floor to her desk. His steps slow, then stop, as he catches sight of her. She's changed clothes. Of course she has. She was covered in Dick Coonan’s blood. His mind offers up the memory in too-vivid detail, the red expanse of her palms. The smear of blood at her hairline. His mind offers it right up, and his stomach rolls again. 

She can’t have been home and back already. He hasn’t been gone that long on his fool’s errand, so she must have gotten this from wherever her stash of back-up clothing lives. A locker, probably. Some dingy, dented locker in a long row of others just like it, but he can't live with that. He wants Narnia for her. A tall wooden wardrobe that opens onto another world full of blazers and stilettos and slim, impeccably cut trousers. 

It's pretty, what she's wearing. A soft, dark rose shirt. It’s roomy. It swallows her up a little and leaves her arms bare. It puts the glittering chain that holds her mother’s ring on display, and the reminder, stark and delicate all at once, is another body blow. 

Every detail is, really, when he knows it’s the end, and here she is. She’s tucked up into her chair with her hair twisted off her neck, and she's just the prettiest thing. It's not a word that usually comes to mind for her. _Pretty._ She's gorgeous. She's _hot_ and commanding and lean and sexy and absolutely toe-curling. But right now, she's pretty. It's arresting. He feels even more ill-prepared with nothing but four dinners and a way out to offer her. A definitive end. 

He feels even more unequal to the task when he makes his feet move again and he catches the sharp scent of soap. Of some nameless shampoo, and he sees the curling tendrils at her neck that say her hair's still wet. That she must have showered here, and that’s even harder to live with. The image of her elegant feet, pale against the battleship concrete. Her strong, quick fingers scrubbing at her skin. Rivulets of Dick Coonan's blood finding their way down a scuffed silver drain. 

“Montgomery’s post-incident evaluation.” She says it without turning. With a smile in her voice that makes his heart lurch in his chest as he covers the last few feet between them. “You come off like Steven Seagal.”

“Should I be flattered or insulted?” He forces a smile, too. He owes her that. Owes her so much, and if he overshoots a little, it still serves. He thinks so, anyway. 

He lowers himself into the chair beside her desk. _His_ chair, except it won’t be anymore. It’ll sit empty or find its way back to some hallway or storage closet. It’s another thought that’s almost more than he can bear. Almost, but he has to. He _has_ to, so he might as well get it over with. Might as well. 

“I didn’t know what you felt like . . .” 

He busies himself with the take-out bags. He babbles and runs on and fusses, setting out foil and styrofoam. Setting out plastic cutlery and cheap chopsticks and napkins and about a zillion tiny containers of sauces. He peels and folds and tucks and stacks. 

He’s drawing it out. The end. He’s pitifully, painfully drawing it out, but he’s unequal to it, and through it all, she’s silent. Through it all, she’s tucked up in her desk chair, with her hair twisted up and her mother’s ring warming against her skin. Through it all, she’s pretty and silent until she seems to think he’s finished. Until she seems to think he might have talked himself out for the moment. 

“It wasn’t your fault, you know,” she says quietly, and he sees that she means it. 

It’s a lie from start to finish. He strong-armed Esposito. He recruited Doctor Death and even used Lanie against her. He betrayed her trust almost from the start, and today—with Coonan—he screwed up. He was too eager to be the hero. Too slow to see the obvious. He’s screwed up time and time again, and of course it’s his fault. Of _course_ it is, and still, he sees that she means it. 

“I overstepped . . .” His confession comes spilling out. His apology and his unshaken intent to end it. “I’m through . . .” 

It comes spilling out in halting, painful phrases, but hers does, too. 

“I’d like you around . . .” she says, fierce and then quiet. Then shy, he’d say if she were anyone else. “I have a hard job . . .” 

Her confession comes spilling out, and it isn’t the end, after all. 

He wants to thank her. He wants to tell her how amazed he is by her strength. The grace of her kindness under impossible conditions. He wants to go on telling her how sorry he is. How life-changing these months have been and how grateful he is every day that she stumbled into his life. That she wants him to keep stumbling through hers.

He wants to tell her she’s pretty, but he sees the blush on her cheeks. He sees she’s worn out and vulnerable, and it’s enough that this isn’t the end. It’s enough. 

“Your secret’s safe with me.” 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sooooo many things wrong with this one, but I started like four different things today. Oh, well.


	20. Testament—Will, Part 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “She’s not sorry she came home”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I wrote a story called Testament, which is a 7-chapter AU set during Beckett’s self-imposed exile. This is the first part of a sequel to that. All you really need to know, if you don’t want to read Testament, is that Castle shows up at Jim’s cabin, and ultimately Beckett decides to go back to the city with him.  This is the first part of that sequel. I’ll post the second part of it tomorrow.

She’s not sorry she came home. Even when the sweat burns her eyes. When her body gives out less than halfway through the count she's supposed to reach, and she’s never hated another human being more than she hates this physical therapist, she’s not sorry.

When she's shaking, and her clothes are stuck to her skin. When she stinks to high heaven and she can barely lift her feet. When she takes ten steps and has to lean on whatever flat surface is near enough, she thinks of him. Of seeing him. Being with him. She thinks of him waiting for her, and she's not sorry.

The world intrudes on her, though. It pushes hard at her boundaries, like it’s making up for lost time. Her phone rings constantly, and her mailbox is eternally full. Voice, electronic, actual—all full, all the time.  

There's always something waiting in the lobby of her building when she gets home. Flowers and plants start showing up again. Cards and little gifts. Increasingly not-so-subtle hints that's it's strange—worse than strange—the way she'd survived a bullet, only to drop out of her own life entirely for months. _Months._

It all makes her writhe with embarrassment. With guilt, because they were terrified and heartsick. Not just him, but everyone. It makes her think about running all over again. Except not really. She doesn't really think about running, and she's not sorry, even though it's hard. Everything's hard.

Lanie keeps her talking for hours, and her dad’s suddenly exercising _just-dropping-by_ rights like that's something they do. Like it’s something they've ever done. There are times when she wants to switch off every light and turn every lock and sit in the dark, silent and blessedly alone.

But she's not sorry, because there's him. There’s Castle and this tentative idea of _them_ that has him using the key she gave him to her apartment. He uses it, and every single time, his face lights up like it’s the best new toy he’s ever had.

Every single time, the knock as he pushes the door open gets softer and softer. More and more, it’s a formality, and he’s almost entirely over the shy peek around the corner and the uncertain _hey_ before he comes in.

He’s almost bold these days as he strides right through the front hall. As he holds her out at arm’s length and looks her up and down, trying to see if the day has been good, bad, or indifferent.

He’s almost bold as he kisses her, and she’s not at all sorry she came home. 

 

* * *

She _thinks_ she's sorry sometimes. In the heat of their worst fights, she thinks coming back to the city is the dumbest thing she could have done. Starting this with him when she’s broken is the dumbest thing. But she only thinks that sometimes. Only in the very blackest moments, and it never lasts beyond a bit-back second. Just the tiniest sliver of a moment, and  she's careful to keep her mouth shut tight, because she absolutely will not— _will not_ —give voice to whatever dark thought leaps suddenly to her tongue.

She regrets even the feeling instantly. The very thought of being sorry. She's contrite. Always and immediately contrite, and sometimes she's so over-the-top with it that that makes him worry, and she ends up talking anyway. She ends up telling him, and he ends up telling her, and they figure out where it came from. Why they were fighting in the first place.

They . . . kind of figure it out, and it's a lot like that first night at the cabin. It's things half said and halting confessions made nose to nose in the dark, because there's still a _lot_ they have to work through. From while she was gone and before that. From how they got to a point where leaving—isolating herself so completely—seemed like the right thing to do. The only thing.  

So they talk and they fight, and they hold each other in the dark. Their tears mix, and they each fall asleep with the bitter taste of the other's hurt on their tongue. But they wake together, too. He never leaves, no matter how bad the fight is. She never asks him to, and she's not sorry.

She's not, even though she's never really done this—even though she's never really stuck around through something this _hard_ —she knows it's normal. Or she tells herself it is. And Burke tells her it is.  And her dad tells her, and Lanie does, too.

 _He_ tells her it's normal, even though his voice wavers, and he forgets himself. He forgets how broken her body still is, and he holds on too tight. He grabs hold of her shoulders or fingers or whatever part of her he can lay hands on, because fighting like this—struggling through the mess they've made—is terrifying. To him, too, and  she tries not to be scared that _he's_ scared.

But he is, and she thinks maybe he's never stuck around through something this hard, either. Even though he's been married twice, and she understands less and less how that came to be.

How it could possibly happen, when every single thing she knows about him tells her that he loves with every cell in his body. That he would've stuck around through anything to give Alexis a whole, stable family. But it doesn't seem like that was an option, and she only knows a few bits and pieces.

And then there’s Gina . . . she doesn't know about Gina. And she kind of doesn't want to know. It's still such a fresh wound, and so much of her hurts already. So much of her hurts all the time that she thinks she doesn't want to know. Except she does. There are too many places in her own mind, dark and loud with whispers, for her to not _need_ to know him and why and whether it's true that they're both new at this.

She might need to know if they are. She might need to find out, why he’s never stayed. How it came to pass, and that’s terrifying. Terrifying.

But she’s not sorry she came home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like I’m running a con, trying to get people to read other stuff, which I promise I’m not, but this sequel to that just started to assert itself, and apparently it won’t shut up.


	21. Testament—Will, Part 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He doesn't stay every night. Not every single one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The conclusion (?) of this?

 

He doesn't stay every night. Not every single one. They spend the evenings together without fail. He tries to feed her up. He rifles through her cabinets and kitchen drawers. He declares her pantry a scandal and her fridge a disaster zone. He makes lists. He shows up, grocery bags in hand, and he cooks for her.  He hovers and makes a nuisance of himself when she wants to “cook” for the two of them. 

They eat on TV trays, sprawled out on the couch because that’s all she can usually manage by day’s end, and sometimes he goes at the end of the night. Sometimes, he tucks her in—or gets as close to that as she'll let him, anyway—and leaves her with a lingering kiss

_Back to the loft._

That's what he says every single time, and it's impossible not to notice. The way he very carefully doesn't hang the word _home_ on any place in particular. Not here or there or anywhere, and she's probably overthinking it. She's definitely overthinking it, but how could she not when it seems like those nights are easier somehow? 

It makes no sense, but they are. 

She's wildly unsure of him in daylight. When she's trembling atop some stupid exercise ball or weeping in Burke's leather arm chair, she's sure today will be the day he realizes that all this is nothing like worth the effort. That _she_ is nothing like worth it. In daylight, she's sure they're constantly one second from ending.

It should be worse by night. When he’s not making her laugh. When he’s not cajoling her out of whatever foul mood she’s in or meeting her on the field of whatever stupid battle one of them has wandered in to. 

It should be worst of all when he goes, and he does sometimes. Entire nights he spends without her when there's nothing and no one he's leaving for. The loft is empty, save for him. Alexis and Martha are off in the Hamptons, and maybe that's part of it. In her twisted-up mind, maybe it's easier knowing there's no one and nothing he's going to. No one and nothing he's leaving her for, and anyway, he calls every time. 

Maybe it's easier because he calls. He always calls, and in some ways that feels just right. She laughs with the phone on the pillow next to her cheek as he tells her stream-of-consciousness bed time stories. They're made up and true and everything in between. 

It feels just right for him to call and tell her stories. For him to listen sometimes, when she has some halting tale of her own to tell. When she needs him to know her physical therapist is _actually_ the worst and they plot his murder. They discuss the pros and cons of asking Lanie to help them hide the body.  

It feels just right, even though she drops off to sleep most nights anyway. Long before either of them finishes anything, and that feels easier. She wakes to the cheerful green bubble he always sends, and it's a secret little joy. A counter-balance for the worst of the pain—the hangover from the previous day's PT, and the grim prophecy for the day.  It's a secret little joy that his words are the first thing to greet her on the mornings when _he_ isn't. When the overwhelming fact of his body isn't, and that's part of it. 

Because he's careful of her. Torturously so, and she's careful of him in a wholly separate way. A wholly different way she can only see out of the corner of her eye, because there's so much else to deal with. To recover from and get past and be over, and that's . . . it's a clear and present danger on the nights when he stays.  It's those nights she comes closest to being sorry she came home.Not quite sorry, but closest. 

It’s a paradox. A terrible paradox, but it's true.

 

 

* * *

 

She's amazed it didn't happen sooner. That's her first thought when she runs into Josh in the hospital hallway. Her one-hundred-and-first thought, well behind how bad she must look. How bad she must smell and how her embarrassingly oversized workout clothes are stuck to her scarecrow frame. But right after all that, she realizes that really, it should have happened sooner, because it’s a hospital serving a city of eight million people, so _of course_ she’d run into Josh in the hallway. 

“Kate!” he says, and it’s cold, despite the exclamation point. It’s smug, despite the smile, or maybe that’s just him. Maybe it was always him.  
  
“Josh. Hello.” That’s cold, too, and she doesn’t necessarily mean it to be. She can't remember for the life of her what she was like with him. What he was like with her. “Hi,” she adds, as if it might help. It doesn’t help. 

“PT?” He makes it a question when it’s not. When they’re standing under a fucking sign. There’s no other possible explanation why she’s wrecked and holding up a nasty hospital wall in the middle of the goddamned day. “You’re better.” He must realize it’s a pronouncement. That it’s unwelcome, and he quickly corrects himself. “You look better.” 

“I am,” she tells him, even though it feels like a lie right then. Even though it’s so _unbearably_ awkward that she feels anything but fine, she doubles down. “A lot better.” 

“Good. That’s good.”

He doesn’t believe her. Personally or professionally, he doesn’t believe her, and he’s a little bit smug about it. A little bit satisfied to see her still struggling so many months on, and she just wants the moment to be over. She wants to hunt down his schedule. To  violate every rule of privacy in the book just so this never, _ever_ happens again. 

She’s thinking about that. Thinking about feigning collapse or going to into WitSec just to not be in this conversation any more, when it gets worse. 

“I’m glad, Kate,” he says, and she believes him. “I wish you nothing but the best.” 

Cold or not—smugly satisfied or not—she has to believe him, and it’s somehow worse that he manages to wish her well.

 

* * *

 

“Don’t go,” she says. He’s tucking her in that same night. They’ve eaten too much, and he’s pleased about it. Pleased that she started nodding off half on top of him in front of some dumb movie. He’s pleased, and now he’s sitting on the edge of her bed making a show of it. Plumping the pillows and fussing with the duvet, but she captures his hands. She tugs at them. “Don’t go tonight.” 

He looks surprised, not pleased. He's not exactly displeased, but the satisfied expression that was there just a minute evaporates. What replaces it is complicated, and she hates that. She fucking _hates_ it. 

“Ok,” he says. He smiles like it is, but it’s not really. “I . . . um . . . I don’t really have anything clean to sleep in.” He takes a shuddering breath. He tries to look game. "Boxers, if you don't mind." 

He looks down at himself. At his jeans and button down and she realizes so very after the fact that it’s a uniform. It’s a code for nights he doesn’t stay, and she’s stupid. She’s _so_ stupid for not even realizing. 

“I mind,” she says. She arches an eyebrow as pushes herself up. "I _do_ mind." She’s going for seductive. She's going for Kate fucking Beckett, but her body turns traitor. Her scars pull and her muscles protest. Every joint sings out in pain, and she winces. She masks it with a fierce grin and goes for the placket of his shirt. She hauls her body closer to his—his body closer to hers—and kisses him. “Just don’t go.” 

“Beckett . . .”  He gasps into her mouth. His arms go around her in a reflex that’s as much about fear as passion. As much about worry as desire. “God, Beckett. Ok, I won’t. I won’t—” 

The promise dissolves into a curse as she yanks his shirttails free. As she finds the warm skin beneath, and her hands roam freely. It dissolves into frantic, dizzy, wordless motion. Into his hands on her and hers on him. Into deep kisses and breathlessness and . . . 

 _“Kate!”_ Her name is a sharp slice of alarm, penetrating sudden fog. Sudden blackness. "Jesus, Beckett." 

He's holding on too tight. He's hurting her. Fighting against her and trying to set her back down on the bed when she's struggling upright. 

"Fuck, _Castle!"_ she cries out. "Hurts. It hurts."    

"Lie down." He overpowers her. His fingers go slack at her shoulders, but he uses his weight. His leverage. The fact that he's not fucking broken. "Kate. For God's sake, just _lie down._ " 

She does. She doesn't have any choice. The tears are sliding down her face and every breath is an absolute punishment. It's like the first night in the cabin. It's worse, and it isn't. He stays near. He trails his fingers down her side and spreads his palm wide between her shoulder blades. He props her up and warms her with proximity and kisses and nonsense choked out between angry breaths. Endearments and curses and admonishments that are better than any tall tale. Better, but not easier.  

"Why do you go?" She asks later. So much later. "Why do you go sometimes?" 

"I thought—" he begins and ends in a single breath. "It seemed like . . . you'd want me to. Sometimes." 

He sounds sullen. Resentful. He probably is. He probably should be and probably shouldn't, but they suck at this. They kind of suck at this for two people crazy in love with each other. She buries her face against his chest as the thought settles over her. New and not new. She's crazy in love with him. He’s crazy in love with her.

"I never want you to go," she grumbles against him. "Except sometimes I probably want you to go."

"Sounds about right." He laughs. He huffs a sigh of relief hard enough to ruffle her sweat-matted hair. "I never want to go." 

Silence falls. They let it. It feels like a monumental effort, but they let it rest heavy on the two of them in the dark. 

"I want you.” It comes creeping out of her, and she hates how small it sounds. How embarrassed, and she hates the way her fists are curled in his shirt. 

“Of course you do.” He scoffs. He tries to sound like his old, cocky self, but he doesn’t, and he gives it up anyway. He sounds small, too. Tentative. “You know I want . . .” He heaves in a breath to steady his voice. “I want you, too. But I know you hurt.” His palm finds the sharpness of her hip bones, the prominence of each rib through the worn fabric of her oversized t-shirt. “And I don’t want you to think . . .” He groans into the crook of her neck. His mouth opens over her skin. “I _really_ want you. But that’s never been all I wanted.” 

“Never?” she laughs into his hair. She drops her voice. “Do you know, have _gorgeous_ eyes.”

He doesn’t laugh, though. “Never.” He finds her lips in the dark. “Not for a second.” 

“Oh,” she says, savoring the taste of him. “Oh.” 

“So I’m not going?” he murmurs.

“Not going.” She drags her fingers along his spine. It feels daring. Wicked and exquisite. “Definitely not.” 

“And you’ll tell me if it hurts.”  He slides his hand higher. His fingers stroke the soft curve of her breast, feather light. 

“I’ll tell you,” she promises on a sharp inhale. 

“You know . . . This is very Indy and Marian.” 

She laughs out loud. Just shy of a nervous breakdown at the lazy wandering arc of his thumb along her collar bone. In the valley between her breasts. Not quite over the scar. He makes her laugh out loud. 

“Nerd.” She catches the corner of his lip in her teeth. “Why do you want me to want you to go?”

“I don’t.” He nudges closer to her body. Grows bolder. “You don’t.” 

“I don’t.” She shivers. “You don’t.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think it turned out a bit weird. I had the interaction with Josh at the very top of the piece in the beginning and it had no dialogue. It didn't seem to work there, and I'm not sure it works here, either, but even in an AU where they were kinder to one another, I think Kate being back during her recovery would have been a challenge.


	22. All Arise

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “She wants him to wake up.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Episode insert for the very beginning of After the Storm (5 x 01). 

 

 

You spit thick and you cross your heart

But the culvert's all run dry

From keeping shotgun shy, all arise

Just be mine tonight

— “All Arise,” The Decemberists 

* * *

 

 

She wants him to wake up. She’s curled up small on one side of the bed. One side of the enormous, sinfully comfortable bed, and he’s sprawled out. He’s belly-down and expansive in the pale light just before dawn. He's disheveled and warm and broad across the shoulders and she _really_ wants him to wake up. 

She has to go to the bathroom, among other things. Which she doesn’t need him to wake up for. In fact, she curls tighter into herself and decides she’s changed her mind completely. She doesn't want him to wake up, until she’s taken care of that particular business, except . . . _except._

Except it’s his bathroom. _His._ And the idea of using it—of wandering around his home while he sleeps—seems weird. And it’s weird that it seems weird, because it’s not like she hasn’t been here a hundred times. It’s not like she hasn't used the damned bathroom before. She _lived_ here, however briefly, and any compunction she might have about using his personal bathroom would be the actual weird thing, even if they _hadn’t_ just spent an entire, mind-blowing night trying to crawl inside each other.

Which they _did . . ._

And it _was . . ._

And she’s right back to really, _really_ wanting him to wake up. But hasn’t yet. Still. She holds her breath and lifts her head carefully and, no, he’s definitely still not awake, and she’s officially ridiculous. 

She has to go to the bathroom, and the en suite is, like, ten feet away. And she’s damned well going to use it. It’s not like he’d make her go use the one upstairs, if he _were_ awake, so she should just go. Which she is. Going. Definitely going. 

She slithers out from under the covers. Everything sounds loud. The hiss of linen and the thump of her feet on the floorboards, and _Jesus,_ it’s cold. She hears the low thrum of the central air and stands there, naked and hunched and— _fuck—_ she’s naked and the blinds aren’t even closed and . . .  

“ _Fuck.”_ She claps her hands over her mouth. It’s objectively a whisper. Barely a rasp, because her throat is raw with a long night and . . . well. Her throat is raw, but she’s freezing and panicked and everything sounds loud, and if he wakes up now, she’ll die on the spot. 

He stirs just then. His brow furrows, and the corners of his mouth turn down. He huffs out a breath that fans at the heavy fall of hair across his forehead. It’s adorable. It’s an alarm bell. She’s caught between wanting to jump him and wanting to jump out the window. 

He grunts and shifts. His head rolls on the pillow until he’s facing her. She sees the rapid back-and-forth of his eyes beneath his lids. She sees his long lashes flutter, and panic wins the day. She races for the bathroom. 

It takes her a moment to find the light switch. A long moment in the pitch dark, and it’s _cavernous_ in there. Her breath echoes. Her footfalls echo and the skittering of her nails over tile as she gropes for the switch. Her palm finally hits the mark, flooding the room with light. 

The breath goes right out of her. She almost doubles over at the sight of her body. It’s mottled all over with bruises. _All over_ , except where lurid patches of purple are streaked with angry scrapes and gashes. Her scars are the least of it, but they’re what send her to the floor. Long, angry, gnarled fingers along her side and the mess of cobweb white and stippling between her breasts.  The scars send her right to the cold tile in a heap. 

She hurts. Everything hurts. Her ribs when she breathes. Her ribs when she holds her breath. Her knees and ankles and elbows and back and jaw. Her shoulders. She tries to draw her knees up. She tries to draw her arms around them, and _God_ , her shoulders. Everything hurts, and she’s not sure how she hadn’t noticed till now. 

She’s not sure how she hadn’t noticed how _awful_ it all looks. How her body is faithful history of every blow Cole Maddox landed. Of every hell-bent choice she’s made in the last few days. She prods and presses at each bruise at every lump she can find and it’s overwhelming. The shame of it. The memory of it all.  

It’s overwhelming until her fingers find a small mark smack in the middle of her belly. It’s dark. It’s dark red–pink against a blue-purple splotch spreading out from her lower ribs. It’s tiny and perfect and another memory takes her. 

A better memory of him climbing her body with infinite care. The second time. The third, maybe. She hardly remembers, but he’d climbed her body _so_ patiently, one palm sweeping up the outside of each thigh as he made his way from the foot of the bed to claim her where she lay back, sprawling and expansive against the headboard. His head bowed over her body and the rumble of his words. The upward tip of his smile toward her and laughter. Him. Her. Laughing, though she hasn’t the least idea what he said. What he could have said at such a moment, but she remembers laughing. 

She reads a different story from that tiny mark on. Her fingers light at her hip, at her collarbone and in a sweet, tender arc behind her ear.  She shivers with memory. With cold, because she’s an idiot. Because she’s sitting on the floor of his bathroom instead of climbing his body with infinite care. 

She pushes to her feet. She gasps at the pain, then leans into it. She twists and flexes. She gets herself together, lingering to cast a longing look at the giant sunken tub along the way. 

 _Later,_ she thinks to herself, shivering all over again. _Later._

She stands tall and slips back into the bedroom. She creeps to his side of the bed, her hands hovering just over the inviting expanse of his bare back. She wants him to wake up. She wants to wake him, but not quite yet. Not quite. 

She presses a barely there kiss to his shoulder blade. She has second thoughts about _not quite._ Third and fourth thoughts, but she goes. She makes her way to the closet. She hesitates at the door. Wavers on the brink of such intimacy, then laughs soundlessly at herself. Her hand flutters over the mark on her belly. She’s standing naked just outside his closet and it’s absurd. 

  
She steps inside. She inhales the scent. Aromatic cedar and a hint of his cologne. She trails her fingers along the row of dark jackets and button downs in a dozen shades of blue. Of red and burgundy and grey until she comes to what she wants. To exactly what she’s been looking for without looking for it all—a crisp, white shirt with the faintest silky pin stripe. She slips it from the hanger. Slips it on to her body and spends an inordinate amount of time deciding on the exact number of buttons to do up. The exact positioning of them. 

When she’s satisfied, she turns. She catches sight of herself in the full-length mirror, and it’s night and day, the way she feels, standing there with the sleeves rolled up and the crisp, luxurious fabric falling to mid-thigh. She doesn’t hurt any less. The bruises and bumps are no less alarming, but she sees herself through his eyes. Through the memory of his awed, laughing, reverent attention, and she feels beautiful. She feels strong and certain. 

She slips through the door back into the bedroom. She races to the bedside, and he’s still asleep. He’s still sprawled and expansive and entirely too inviting, but still asleep, and she’s glad. For the moment, she’s glad. 

She makes her way to the kitchen, telling herself she’s not nervous. That it’s not weird, and Martha is _definitely_ not going to come swanning through the door like last time. She tells herself they have the place entirely to themselves, and when she finds everything where it should be— when she moves with certainty from drawer to cabinet to coffee maker and finds she can do this from memory—she believes it. 

She hears it just as she’s pouring. The thump of a pillow hitting the floor. The rustle of bed sheets. She hears it and smiles down at her handiwork. She lets her head fall back and thanks heaven for perfect timing. She gives his cup a final stir, a final _tink_ of the spoon against the thick ceramic wall of the mug, and turns. 

She pads on quiet, certain feet across the floor. Across the whole loft, drawn by the promise of him. The glimpse of him, entirely awed, exactly as she’d have it. Exactly. She passes through the strange alcove separating the bedroom from the front door. She slows her pace just a fraction. She sets one foot just so in front of the other, flashing just the right amount of leg. Reveling in it as his jaw drops a little further. 

“I made you a coffee.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AKA—The healing power of the hickey. I roll my eyes at myself.


	23. Out of Desire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's a moment when it's innocent.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Insert for Knockdown (3 x 13)

 

But kiss me out of desire,

babe, not out of consolation

— Jeff Buckley

 

* * *

 

There's a moment when it's innocent. 

He's legitimately frantic. Legitimately terrified and guilt-ridden, because they may be dead. Ryan and Esposito may be dead, and he’s the one who did this. Three years ago when she told him in confidence. When she gave him her trust, and he turned right round and abused it. 

 _He did this_. 

So, yeah, there's a moment when it's all he's got. It's a dumb idea in three acts and nothing more than that. 

Except it's absolutely more than that. 

It's the agonizing creak as she throws the shutters open. It's tear tracks drying on her cheeks. It's the heart-rending, matter-of-fact response when he asks. Haltingly asks.  

_When did you start?_

_Over the summer, when you were in the Hamptons_

There’s a moment when it’s a grand gesture. Something he hopes to God is heroic that might erase some of the blame here.

Her hand drops to her hip, and he knows what comes next. He imagines the  hollow shucking sound of her weapon unholstered. The metallic snick of the safety and the sharp, deafening report just before a bullet rips through her. Through him, maybe, but _he did this._  

There’s a moment when it’s a stage kiss. 

He knows how to do that. Once upon a time he’d been in high demand by the drama club at the girls’ boarding school behind his because he was tall and anything but too cool for it all. He knew his way around a stage, and the star of pretty much every production for the two years he’d been around taught him the ins and outs of it. 

_No tongue._

He remembers the sharp tone of her voice. The severe look as she advanced on him. Tugged one of his hands right to her hip and slid the other behind her neck. He remembers the sudden weight of her body and the dry warmth of her lips. He remembers the scent of baby powder and the sounds of rehearsal going on as if he wasn’t right there, center stage, kissing the most desirable girl for miles. 

He remembers everything but her name as _then_ meets now in a cold, filthy alley. 

_No tongue._

He knocks her hand away from her hip. 

 _Turn me further upstage_. 

He tugs her close and puts his back halfway between her and the thug who may or may not be buying any of this. He slides his fingers into her hair. His palm finds the curve of her jaw. 

_Hesitate. Two breaths. Draw out the tension for the audience._

He hesitates, that’s for damned sure. Not two breaths, because his lungs won’t work. His heart has stopped, but he hesitates. 

 _Get permission from your scene partner_. 

He tries. He lingers, his lips a fraction of an inch from hers. His eyes flick to hers, and he tries, but there’s no time to decipher her. There’s no time at all, and . . . oh . . . 

 _She_ doesn’t know how to stage kiss. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a quick one


	24. Tomorrow is Another One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chaos is the new black, and he knows it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Schmoopy future fic

 

 

> Today was good.
> 
> Today was fun.
> 
> Tomorrow is another one.
> 
> —Dr. Suess
> 
>  

* * *

 

 

“Babies never sleep.” Lily swings her feet. She drums her heels on the legs of the tall stool. “How come?”

She watches him, chin propped on her fists as he goes from the kitchen through the living room into the office and back through the circuit again. She watches him as he straightens and folds and wipes and stows, all for no apparent reason. Chaos is the new black, and he knows it.

“How come? That is an excellent question.” He looks down just in time to find himself shoving a pair of Kate’s gloves into a drawer with the potholders. He shakes his head at himself.  “One your mother and I have been pondering since _you_ were born.”

“I sleep.” She draws herself up as she says it. She sits straight and prim, all of a sudden.  “I was a _good_ sleeper when I was a baby. Mama says.”

“Mama does say, because you were.” He gives her a drive-by kiss on the top of her head as he goes to toss the gloves on the hall table. “You were the _perfect_ baby, so Mama had _no_ idea what she was in for with your brothers. Up high for the long con!”

“What’s that?” She frowns at him. She raises her little palm and lets him bump it with his own. “Long con?”

“It’s . . .” He tries to think on his feet. He’s already gotten in trouble more than once for some of their oldest’s more colorful vocabulary. “It’s like a joke you tell for a long time before you get to the funny part.

“I don’t like that. I like the funny part _soon.”_ There’s something plaintive in her tone that stops him in his tracks. It’s not like her. Not at all like their serious, self-sufficient little lady.

“Funny part soon is better.” He budges on to the stool next to her. He sets down the muddled stack of newspapers and hand towels he’d meant to do something with. “You’re definitely funny part soon.”

“Babies aren’t,” she says gravely. “Babies are long con.”

“They sure seem to be.” He bumps her shoulder with his own. He rocks her on her stool and catches her around the waist, pulling her on to his lap. “But you love your babies, right, Big Sister?”

She does. She’s careful with them. More than a little bossy, but tender and fiercely protective, too. And shockingly helpful. She’s been a champ over the last few months, so it knocks him flat when her lip quivers. When her little shoulders hitch and two big, fat tears roll suddenly down her cheeks.

“Mama . . .” She hiccoughs. She looks up at him with her sad, golden eyes. “Mama loves the babies.”

 

* * *

 

“Invitation for Captain Beckett.” He raps softly at the nursery door. Not softly enough. Jake stirs in her arms. He grunts and fusses, working up to a full-out yell. Reese isn’t far behind in the cradle at her knee. “Special delivery,” he adds in answer to the glare she’s working up to.

She follows his gaze to the hallway. Lily stands in the doorway. She’s wearing her frilliest night gown and fuzziest robe. She’s clutching an enormous card decorated with all the glitter in the loft. Possibly all the glitter in Manhattan.

“An invitation?” She picks up on his look as he takes Thing 1 from her arms and reaches down to tickle Thing 2’s belly. She nods, taking the handoff as seamlessly as ever. “From my Lily?”

“It’s a _slumber party_ , Mama.” Lily’s stage whisper carries to say the least. “In the _big_ bedroom.”

“In the big bedroom.” Kate presses her lips together against a smile. She beckons the girl into the dim room. “Who’s invited?”

“No _boys._ ” Lily climbs into her lap and rips open the card. “It even says. And there is special cocoa. I make it. Daddy helped.”

“I did help, and I’m _still_ not invited.” He makes an exaggerated sad face, but Lily is unmoved.

“No boys.” She presses her face into Kate’s shoulder. “Tell him, Mama.”

“No boys,” she says. She strokes her daughter’s hair, surprised by the sudden bout of clinginess. “That’s what this very official document says.”

“Official,” Lily echoes. “We go now, Mama.”

She slithers to the floor, tugging at her mother’s hand. Kate looks flummoxed. Overwhelmed and so tired, but he shoos them both toward the door.

“Mama’s cocoa is extra special.” He bounces Jake and nudges the cradle with his knee to keep it rocking. “So don’t mix up the cups.”

“Extra-special?” Kate’s eyes light up, then quickly fade. “Castle . . . I can’t do extra-special.” She nods at the still-fussing twins. “Beasties to feed.”

“Bottles in the freezer.” He waves it off as a mere detail at the exact moment Jake lets out an enormous belch, followed immediately by an artistic spray of spit up. “Bro time,” he says gamely. “To be expected.”

“Bro time?” Kate lingers in the doorway. “You’re sure?”

“Sure.” He nods at the dark head pressed against her hip. The fingers clinging to the swinging hem of her sweater. “You girls have fun.”

 

* * *

He’s half asleep when she slips back into the nursery. Half naked, too. Changing out of his spit up–spattered shirt became a bridge too far right about the time he decided sleeping in the nursery rocker made perfect sense.

“You awake?” she whispers, sliding into his lap. Sliding her hands up his chest. “Castle?”

“Awake.” He inhales sharply. Her hands are freezing. They smell weird. He frowns down at them, still decidedly blurry. “Pink. You’re pink. And purple.”

“ . . . and blue and whatever red this is. Mani–pedis.” She laughs against his neck. “We’re gonna have to burn the sheets. And the comforter. And maybe the blinds.”

“Slumber party success, then?” He swallows down a yawn.

“Big success,” she says, and he can feel her smiling against his skin. “She’s so smart. And she’s funny, and she . . .”

“She can talk?” He nods in the direction of the crib. “These two aren’t the best conversationalists.”

“I feel guilty.”

“For sneaking over to the boys’ camp in the middle of the night?” He slides a hand up her thigh, hiking her nightgown as he goes. “It’s pretty scandalous.”

“For having fun.” She rises up to kiss him. It’s sloppy and exuberant in a completely exhausted way. “Does this feel like too much fun to you?”

“This?” He goes for bare skin again. For a kiss that’s a little more focused, even though it’s hopeless. Even though he can hear Jake thrashing and Reese grunting and he knows they’ve got about twelve seconds to themselves. “This is just the right amount of fun.”

“Not that.” She bats his hands away, then catches them. “Well, _that._ ” She presses the warmth of his palms to her skin. She shivers. “But _this._ ” She gestures expansively. “Them.”

“Them. Too much fun.” He looks at her deadpan. “Beckett, I think you might be drunk.”

“On half a shot of Bailey’s.” She thinks about it. “Which is half a shot more than I’ve had in 14 months. I might be drunk. But this is . . .”  She tips her head way back to look at him. Her eyes are gorgeous in the low light. Dark and lustrous, even with the dark circles and the tired lines. “Castle, I’m having such a good time.”

“Me too,” he tells her, his voice suddenly thick. His heart suddenly full. “A really good time.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry I was late with this one.


	25. With the Lamp Lit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Patience, he thinks, is a funny thing. Not ha-ha funny. Definitely not that. But it's an odd thing he never really had to consider until her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Insert/tag for “Eye of the Beholder” (4 x 05)

 

Hope is patience with the lamp lit —Tertullian, _De Patientia_

 

 

* * *

 

 

Patience, he thinks, is a funny thing. Not _ha-ha_ funny. Definitely not that. But it's an odd thing he never really had to consider until her.

Not in his whole by-the-seat-of-his-pants upbringing, certainly. His mother is not exactly the poster-diva for it, and there was so little to expect, anyway. So little chance that something worth the wait would be around the corner. What good would patience have been?

Kyra might have been the one to teach him, if he'd had the sense to want to learn back then. But by the time she left, life had taught him a different lesson already. About money and swagger and never digging too deep or getting too entangled.

It taught him the beauty of having new passions at the ready long before the old ones had a chance to fray around the edges. It taught him to always keep short-lived obsessions and ill-advised indulgences on tap. By the time Kyra left, life had taught him the beauty of a frictionless existence.

He could have been patient with Meredith. He would have been if there'd been any point. If she'd given him a chance, but she was leaving before he had any idea what had hit him. She was gone before he even had a chance to think. It wouldn't have been any good, either but he'd have tried. He damn well would have.

Raising a kid ought to have taught him. It ought to have been a crash course in patience, but he swears he doesn't remember it that way. Just the opposite. He remembers hardly being able to keep up with this fascinating, funny, wildly curious little thing. He remembers constant transformation. Every day she'd master some new feat or he'd see something entirely new in her, and it's like the rush of scenery through a car window in his memory.

And then there was Kate. Now there is Kate. Or there will be. Might be. Absolutely should be.

If he can just be patient.

The thing is, he has been. For three years, he's been patient, or at least that’s his reckoning on nights when he feels hard done by. Three long months had certainly gotten him in the habit of that. Three months of dreaming up recovery montages starring her and Doctor Motorcycle Boy.  
  
He's still mad. Newly mad a lot of the time, because it's not just that she cut _him_ off so completely. She cut everyone off and he's retroactively blank with fury every time that realization surfaces. She's _still_ such a long way from whole, and he's furious when he thinks of her alone all that time. It's easier than being terrified.

So he calls it three years when he's inclined to lick his wounds, but it's not quite the truth.

Not with this advance and retreat they've done all the while. Not with the two of them hurting each other. Being hurt. Being brave, being fearful, and never, not even once, being on the same damned page.

Until now. Until recently, but not exactly now, because she's . . .

Well, she's driving him nuts at the moment.

She's being completely unreasonable about Serena Kaye, like he ordered the woman up or something. Like he was supposed to clear it with her if he _did_ order up a woman.

Not that he is . . .

Not that he's in the habit of . . .

Not that he would, when they're . . .

Not when he's being patient.

And he is. He's been patient in earnest, and it hasn't really been all that hard until now.

He's angry by night. Terrified and relentlessly awake nights when there’s no body. No case and no reason for her to call him. Him to call her. But being with her when there is covers a multitude of sins. She makes him laugh. She picks on him, and he likes it. He picks on her, and it's even better than it was before. There’s no Gina to feel guilty about. There's no Josh to burn energy hating, and it’s not just that. It’s not just absence. It’s presence. It’s more.

She doesn't close up lately when he teases her. When he flirts. She flirts back. She challenges him and he challenges her. They ooze subtext. They make ridiculous puppy dog eyes and slip a hundred hopeful little messages into everyday conversation, and it must be disgusting from the outside looking in. It must look like the cheesiest teen romance, but it's been easy to be patient.

It was easy before Serena Kaye.

It’s even easy _after_ Serena Kaye. At first it is, anyway, because she’s jealous, right? She’s jealous, and that makes it a hundred and one hopeful little messages. Except it doesn’t, because she’s not jealous, apparently.

_(You know, suit yourself.)_

Or maybe she is jealous, and it's is karmic punishment for fishing.

_(So you think I should . . . pursue it?)_

Maybe it's the Universe swatting him on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper for that, but he's entitled to the occasional long, dark night of the soul, isn't he? The occasional bid for reassurance, because three years of fuck-ups, take away ten minutes of heavily masked conversation about the rest of their lives . . . It's not the kind of math that promotes confidence.

Or maybe he's not. Maybe he's fucking twelve, and he doesn't know the first thing about patience.

 

* * *

 

 

He's turned around entirely by the time he finds himself kissing her. Kissing Serena, not kissing  Beckett, though there's definite target confusion in the moment. He’s turned around and furious to find that she’s furious. Beckett, not Serena, though the lady in red is none too pleased with him, either.  

He spends the rest of the case furious. It’s easier, after all, and there’s a vicious kind of clarity in it. A vicious kind of freedom in pushing Beckett’s buttons until Serena’s off the hook. Until they have their man. Or woman, as it turns out, and that seems fitting.

That seems just about right until they _do_ have their woman, and there’s a sea change in her he doesn’t understand. _Her_ fury winks out just like that, replaced by sudden resignation he doesn’t understand. Sudden resignation that makes him tired. Hopeless.

He watches from the break room, her and Serena with their heads together. They’re smiling, both of them, and he doesn’t understand. He hangs back as long as he can stand it, fiddling with the espresso maker. Stalling until it’s too much.

He creeps closer. He hears his name. A word that might be date and then nothing as her voice drops low, then lower still.

_Why are you telling me this?_

That’s Serena, and it’s irritating. It’s infuriating that she’s still there, and he doesn’t have the time to wonder how that particular paradox  works. He doesn’t have the patience as he leans in. As he strains hard to hear.

_I think that you should know what kind of person you’re dealing with._

* * *

 

  
She wants to take him out for a hamburger. She says it's the least she can do. It’s the hundred and second hopeful sign. It should be, anyway, but something doesn’t sit quite right about it.

It’s not that he’s furious. Not with her, anyway, but clarity isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The whole affair seems to have left him with an answer he doesn’t really know the question to, though he thinks it has something to do with patience and lack thereof. It has something to do with the entirely fleeting tingle that came with kissing Serena Kaye and just how thoroughly Kate Beckett has already ruined him for the kind of instant gratification that's gotten him through most of his adult life  

Whatever it is, it leaves him quiet, and she notices. She more than notices.

  
“You ok?” she asks, and there’s that resignation again. That soft sorrow turned inward.

“I heard you. What you told Serena.” It’s not true. It’s not quite true, and he’s not exaclty sure why he’s bluffing. What he’s bluffing about. “But I don’t . . .”  He’s suddenly at the end of his rope. Not furious, but _frustrated._ “I don’t know why.”

“You were right about her.” Her voice is even. It’s absolutely even, but he can see it’s an effort. He can see it costs her, and that’s good and bad. It’s a wound and a balm all at once. “You were right. I wasn’t . . .” Her jaw works. “I wasn’t being fair.”

 _Fuck fair._ It’s what he wants to say. It’s what the fierce, furious hope rising up wants to say, but it’s not the right time. It’s another bit of vicious clarity.

“Right isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.” That’s what he says instead. That’s his careful, between-the-lines alternative, because that’s where they are.

“Yeah?” It draws a smile from her. A sly smile that she hides and doesn’t hide behind her milkshake, and that’s where they are, too. “Well, fair straight up sucks.”

Fair sucks. It’s close enough, he thinks, as he smiles back at her. As he steals a french fry and lets her slap his hand away. It’s close enough, and he can wait.

He can be patient.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another thing that started out as something else and came to not much of anything


	26. All My Tomorrows

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s been a while since she’s seen him. An hour maybe, and that’s strange. Beyond strange, given the occasion. She wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for him, whatever the bride says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A tag for A Rose for Ever After (2 x 12).

 

 

> Today I may not have a thing at all  
>  Except for just a dream or two  
>  But I've got lots of plans for tomorrow  
>  And all my tomorrows belong to you
> 
> — “All My Tomorrows,” Ivor Arthur Davies
> 
>  

* * *

 

 

It’s been a while since she’s seen him. An hour maybe, and that’s strange. Beyond strange, given the occasion. She wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for him, whatever the bride says. Whatever she _has_ said half a dozen times as she’s paraded Kate around the room, pointing out that she caught the bouquet. Introducing her as the detective who saved the day before she looks around, puzzled. Before she wonders where he is.

_And Rick . . . where’s he gotten to now?_

She’s asked Kate half a dozen times, and she really wants to know. Her brow furrows and her dazzling smile dims just a little, but someone whisks her off. Every one of those half a dozen times, someone has whisked her off. To the dance floor, to the bar, to the photographer’s makeshift backdrop, or to greet another friend who’s just arrived.

It’s only now she has an answer though. She would have an answer, but Kyra’s somewhere far off when Kate finds him at the dark edge of the dance floor.

He’s on the far side of an abandoned banquet table. One of the ones that never quite filled, given the after-the-factness of the day’s proceedings. He sits with his elbows planted firmly on the pristine white tablecloth, not quite in shadow. His hand is wrapped around a mostly empty rocks glass. She wonders if it’s a Proceed With Caution sign. It might well be. She’s not sure how many that might make since the last time she saw him.

“Still my first,” he says without turning.

“Good,” she says, moving a step closer. “Need another?”

“No.” He scowls into the glass. “Yes?”  He lifts his chin at last. He peers up at her from between his hunched shoulders. “Outlook hazy. Ask again later.”

“Later.” She considers the word. Wonders if it means he’d rather be left alone. If he’d rather she hadn’t found him. “Staying awhile, then?”

“Awhile.” He shifts his fist toward the light, looking at his watch, but not really looking. “I should, right?” His voice is rising. Uncertain, and he wishes it weren’t. He wishes he had’t tipped that particular card, and he overdoes it when he goes on. He lifts the glass and knocks back what’s left in the bottom. “A grown-up would stay awhile.”

“Is that what you are now, Castle?” She takes the chair next to him, then. Decides that what he wants and what she should do might be different things at the moment. “A grown up?”

“She makes me want to try.” He sets the glass on the table with a thump. He finds her. Kyra. His gaze finds her, unerringly now that he’s looking. She’s in the center of the dance floor, holding hands with someone’s little girl. Her head’s tipped back, and she’s laughing, full-throated and joyful, like a harbinger of Kyra yet to be. “She always made me want to try.”

“I can see why,” she says quietly, and she means it. The bride in all her downplayed finery is . . . informative. Enlightening in a way that’s vaguely troubling. Or disruptive, at least, of some comfortably fixed notions about him.  

The conversation, such as it is, dies on the vine then, and she wonders if it’s up to her. The next move. She wonders if she should get him a drink. If he wants an exit and whether she should offer one. She wonders—really _wonders_ —what’s going through his head. What’s going through her own for that matter.

“You don’t have to stay,” he says suddenly. “This has to be weird for you.” He blinks at her, like a light’s just flicked on and his eyes aren’t used to it. “I didn’t mean to just bail . . .”

“Bail? Castle, it’s not like you’re my _date.”_

She’s trying to wave it off. That’s all she means to do, but the truth is everyone thinks he _is_ her date, and she’s been sidestepping it all night long. It’s not like she’s ever going to see these people again, so why make it awkward, and this is all  Lanie’s fault somehow. The fact that she even cares if anyone thinks he’s her date. Or thinks she’s his or whatever, and here she is, screwing this up when she just meant that she didn’t expect . . .

“Ouch,” he says, and it sounds like he’s laughing. He tips his head to the side, looking up at her, and he _is_ laughing, damn him.

“You know what I mean,” she says sullenly.

She kicks him under the table. He scowls and plays it up. He rubs his shin and looks more wounded than he really is, and it’s situation normal, it seems. A little violence, and all’s right with the world as far as the two of them go. They fall silent again, but it’s something a little more comfortable this time. Something a little less fraught.

“It might be later.” He tilts the glass toward the light. He bats the round arc of its heavy base between his palms. “Can I get you one?” He half rises. Can’t resist giving her the gimlet eye. “Even though you’re not my date?”

She’s thinking about it. She’s weighing the pros and cons of sitting half in shadow with him. Keeping watch while he licks his wounds. Or does whatever it is he’s doing. She’s thinking about it when the music changes. It slows and the DJ dims the lights. There’s a sweet swell of horns, and she has a strange idea. A stupid idea

“No,” she says, with her mind suddenly made up. She pushes up out of her chair. She plucks the glass from his hand and sets it aside. “Come on.”

“Come . . . where?” he asks, even though it’s obvious. Even though she’s tugging him by the sleeve toward the only place to go. “Beckett, what are you . . .?”

His words fail him as their feet sound out against the edge of the dance floor. He stops cold.

“A dance,” she says in a low voice. “Let her see that you’re happy for her.” She stands there, awkward as hell with her palm hovering over her shoulder. With the fingers of her right hand waiting for his left. She stands there and toughs it out, because she’s not his date, but she is . . . something. “It’s what a grown up would do.”

“Grown up.” He rolls his eyes, but he closes the gap between them. He rests one hand at her waist and folds his fingers around hers. He steps into the dance. “Sucks,” he mumbles, or something like it.

They sway to the song. It’s a schmaltzy Sinatra number about tomorrows. It’s the kind of thing that’d usually have her reaching for the radio dial, but it’s cute in context. It’s sweet with little girls dancing on the tops of their daddy’s shoes.

“She looks happy,” he says just as Old Blue Eyes gets to the part about luck passing him by.

“She does,” she says, turning them. Turning his back to the center of the dance floor. She means it as a kindness. As _something,_ but when she looks up, he’s giving her a flat look. An utterly flat look. “What?”

“You’re bad at this.” He shakes his head. Clucks his tongue so she knows there’s a punchline coming. He waits for the glare and cracks a smile. “If you’re not the date, then you have to be the sassy best friend. It’s RomCom law.”

“Oh, so you’re not just a grown up.” She laughs. She can’t help it, even though she’s squirming a little inside. Even though this is something dangerously close to flirting and they’re on the dance floor at the wedding of the one who got away. “It’s a RomCom now?”

“It’s totally a RomCom. Of all the gin joints . . .”

She cuts him off. “ _Casablanca_ is _not_ a RomCom.”

“Still,” he says. He sniffs and looks more wounded than he is.

“Still,” she agrees. “She does look happy.” She waits a beat. Waits for the sigh she knows is coming as she turns them broadside toward the center of the dance floor. Toward Kyra and Greg staring into each other’s eyes and mouthing the words, before she adds, “What a bitch.”

“Better.” He grins at her. He lifts his arm and presses at her hip. He twirls her and catches her in one smooth motion. “Much better, Beckett.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1400 words to get to a pretty dumb punchline, but that's Brain!Poneh for you.


	27. You Can Still Betray

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “From the second Ryan's voice, tight with distress, comes crackling down the line. From the second before that, because her eyes find Royce through the bar's milling crowd, and she knows in that second how many red flags she's been ignoring.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An Under the Gun (3 x 03) tag

 

> Love is whatever you can still betray.   
> Betrayal can only happen if you love.
> 
> —Jean le Carré

* * *

 

She wants to be alone.

From the second Ryan's voice, tight with distress, comes crackling down the line. From the second before that, because her eyes find Royce through the bar's milling crowd, and she knows in that second how many red flags she's been ignoring. How many odd little questions and sentimental gestures she's let slide, even though they're  nothing like him, because she's been so damned eager for it to be true. So damned eager for him to want her back, whatever that means.

She knows everything before Ryan's words in her ear make any kind of sense, and she wants—profoundly _wants_ —to be alone.

It's not in the cards, though. Crawling into a hole and dragging it in after herself isn't an option. Not for someone who's fucked up as badly as she has, so she pulls the other way. She asks questions, even though she already knows the answers.

She asks why Royce had risked coming back to the precinct after already he'd whisked Random off to make his deal. She wonders right out loud how long he'd been playing her.

She makes them say it out loud. Castle. Esposito. She punishes herself with hearing it, even though the pieces have long since fallen into place for her. Every painful one.

_When I took the picture of the two of you . . ._

_Your boy Royce was part of the investigation._

And then he calls. He has the fucking gall to call her, and she manipulates him. She tries to, anyway. She grits her teeth and tells the truth. She has no idea if it will work. No idea if spelling out what he damned well already knows will have any effect at all, but this is her mess, and she has to try.  She doesn't get to run home and lick her wounds in private, however badly she wants to. She fucked up. This is her punishment, so she takes it.

She opens a vein for all the world to see.

_Mike. I was in love with you._

* * *

 

She hears it. The low hum of pity. The buzz of condemnation punctuated by smug satisfaction from those more than happy to see her knocked down a peg. There's no shortage of either, and she feels it all. Pity and scorn. She feels it in her bones. In her teeth and all the way to the roots of her hair. She feels it, an ache that rises up from every cell.

She lives with it, though. She stands tall in front of the murder board. She reaches up and empties it methodically. What’s done is done.

She tries to filter out the noise. Outside noise. There’s no help for the din inside, but she tries  to let the words wash over her and to somehow not notice that they're all hovering. Montgomery peering through the blinds of his fishbowl office. Esposito and Ryan bickering. A hushed duet about whose job it ought to be. Whose job she ought to be, but it's lip service. They're waiting for him.

_Castle._

It's his job. She’s his job, and there isn't a person there who doesn't know it. Esposito melts away, radiating relief when it finally looks like Castle is about to step up. He doesn’t right away, though. He lingers on the far side of the bullpen fence, steeling himself, and Ryan, at least, has the good grace to ask. To make sure that Castle knows that he's the one whose drawn the short straw.

_How is Beckett holding up?_

_It's hard to see your heroes fall._

He answers Ryan quietly, and she knows he knows everything. She blazes up for an instant. She wants to scream at him—scream at them all—that Castle isn’t some kind of authority on Kate Beckett.

But he is. He's written the book on her, after all, and he _does_ know. And what’s worse, she’s glad. She’s undeniably glad to know she hadn't fooled him in the least by switching it off. Pretending to switch it off.

_Did I keep him on long enough?_

She’s glad he sees through her.

* * *

 

He takes her on a treasure hunt. Of course he does. He soothes her heart by engaging her mind. Or he tries to, anyway, and isn’t this how they work? Aren’t these the corners they retreat to, every time? He’s side-by-side with her through the solve—through the snipping of the case’s last loose end, and he takes her on a treasure hunt.  

Of course he does.

The question is why she goes along. She should’ve told him no. Her mouth is still crowded with the hundred reasons she could have given him. Should have given him, starting with the summer. Starting with his ex-wife and  Royce. Fucking Royce, and the fact that she's not even surprised, or she shouldn't be, anyway.

She feels bruised by it all. By the hundred reasons she has for not going on a late-night treasure hunt with him. For not being charmed by his giddy excitement. For not being charmed by him or anyone at all, because she has rotten fucking judgement.

So why did she go along? She doesn’t have an answer. Not one that bears examination. She wants to be alone. Sincerely wants that, still, and maybe this is nothing more than falling forward. Maybe he just happens to be there, and any second she’ll come to her senses.

She hasn’t yet, though. She's followed him through a maze of stagnant angels and moldering scrollwork. In and out of limestone shapes, stained green and looming in the shadows. She’s fallen forward until now.

“Why is this so _hard?”_ he gasps. "I mean, six feet under? Isn't that excessive?” He plants his short-handled shovel in the turf. He leans on it and swipes the back of his hand across his brow.

She ignores him. It’s theater, mostly. She's been doing the heavy lifting. Literal, anyway. She’s been the one setting the blade of her shovel to sod. Setting metal to earth, over and over and over.

They’re knee deep, an she ignores him as he natters on about surviving the Zombie Apocalypse and appreciating the head start. When he moves another shovelful or two, then stops again. She ignores him until his hand is on her back. His fingers are prying hers from around the shovel.

“How about a break,” he says. He sounds strange. He looks strange. “Beckett, you hands, they’re . . .”

“Fine,” she snaps. She jerks the shovel savagely from his grasp. “My hands are fine.”

But they’re not. They’re blistered and bleeding. She’s sore and miserable and drenched in sweat. She’s fucking determined, and he’s hovering. He’s trying to reason with her.

“Kate, let me . . .”

“I’m _fine.”_

She’s flat out yelling now, and there’s a part of her that’s horrified. A part of her that’s already embarrassed, regretful, sheepish, abashed and a hundred other things. There’s a part of her that really is over all the things she’s pretending to be over, but most of her is digging.

And then she’s not.

Then the blade hits something solid and the impact judders through her frame. It sends a shockwave up and out that clacks her teeth and makes her ears ring. It sends her sprawling and him right after her.

“Beckett!”

He snatches at her. He snags a fistful of her shirt and keeps her from tumbling headlong into the split-open, rotting wood. Headlong into a fucking B-movie pile of shimmering gems. He keeps her from falling entirely, but he goes to one knee, sagging against the crumbling dirt wall. She ends up in his arms, sobbing. Filthy, sweaty, bleeding and sobbing, absolutely wordlessly.

“I’m sorry.” It’s all he says as he holds her. “Kate. I’m so sorry.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A meld of at least 4 versions of this. Ugh.


	28. Blackwing 602

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “She doesn't mean to take it. She doesn't mean to take anything, but it's worse than that. She hadn’t meant to come here in the first place.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This starts during A Chill Goes Through Her Veins (1 x 05), but goes through the end of season 1. This probably has a second half, but it’s unlikely I’ll get to it in the next two days. Hopefully it stands alone as is. 
> 
>  

 

She doesn't mean to take it. She doesn't mean to take anything, but it's worse than that.

She hadn’t meant to come here in the first place. Certainly hadn’t meant to stay when the door opened on the bizarre, if domestic, scene. Laser tag gear and mud masks. It’s the last thing she would have pictured, if she’d been in the habit of picturing him at home. But she's not in the habit of that, or hadn’t meant to be.  

She hadn't meant any of this, but here she is darting furtive glances around his office. Here she is slipping a pencil purloined from his desk into the slash pocket of her coat. Here she is asking him for . . . something. Closure. Escape. A satisfying ending for once. Here she is, little more than month in, and he's driven her to this: Neediness and petty larceny.

She hadn’t meant for any of it to happen.

* * *

 

The larceny isn't so petty, as it turns out. It’s an utterly mortifying revelation she stumbles on the first time she takes her contraband for a spin. It's later when she does. A while later, and she's been pretending the whole time that it's not still in the pocket of that coat. She's been pretending the whole time that she's forgotten all about it

She hasn't forgotten, though. The day she "remembers," it's been a while since she's seen him. A few days, and it's not like she misses him, or anything. It's not that she hasn't been absolutely reveling in peace and quiet and paperwork. It's just that life is slow.

There haven't been any real cases, Not any Beckett-flavored ones, anyway, and now she has an actual day off. She’s already done her errands. She's indulged in her thirty minutes of loafing on the couch, and things are slow, so she retrieves it. The thing she's supposed to have forgotten. The thing she's not supposed to have taken in the first place.

She makes her way to the front closet and slips it back out of the slash pocket of her coat. She sketches her name. She admires the sweep of her signature writ large on a drawing pad she doesn't remember buying. She doesn't remember having, but there it is when she the urge strikes.

It feels gorgeous. The weight of it in her hand and the way it sails across the surface of the paper. There's none of the unpleasant squeak or drag of a plain old yellow No. 2, and that makes her roll her eyes. Of course there'd be none of that. Not in anything he'd deign to write with. Anything he'd own.  

But even accounting for that—for the _himness_ of it—it's an instrument so ridiculously lovely that it makes her curious. The aroma of the wood and the satisfying creak of it in the sharpener. The way it takes an enduring, needle-fine point. The crimped metal of the ferrule gives way beneath the gentle press of her thumb when she eases more of the eraser free to study the bevel he's left, and that may be the detail that most captures her attention.

He's used this one, and the fascination isn't in the contagious magic of it—an object he might have used to sketch one of the Derrick Storm scenes that helped her keep her head above water a decade ago. It isn't _just_ in contagious magic, her secret identity as a long-standing Richard Castle fan girl, notwithstanding. It’s a mystery, too—Richard Castle, professional annoyance, doesn't strike her as a pencil person in the least—and mysteries are her bread and butter.

He takes notes. Infuriatingly takes notes on the back of her paperwork. In the margins of her notes. He tears the edges off her legal pads and leaves them ragged. He takes notes in the stupid spiral pad he remembers every once in a while. On his phone sometimes, when he thinks he can get away with it. But when he writes by hand, it’s all bold gestures. Every time she’s caught him writing, it’s been all emphatic ink and the rare strikeout, just as bold.  

And then there’s this. A Blackwing 602 that he's obviously used. The only one he's used of an even dozen. That had been part of the draw, though she only realizes it now in casting her detective's mind back to the scene of the crime. To a cheesy, lump mug that his kid must've made for him and a forest of twelve pencils, eleven of them all of a height with one another. Eleven with precise, pristine erasers.

And this one, shorter than its companions by an inch or more, its eraser definitely and emphatically the worse for wear. It’s the only one he had used, and somehow it had made its way into her coat pocket. Somehow, it had made its way home with her to sail across the page of a drawing pad she doesn't remember buying.

It's all enough of a mystery to make her curious, and that's unfortunate. It turns out to be unfortunate, because it’s a $100 pencil. She can’t believe her eyes when she Googles it, but $100 is where it starts for a freaking knockoff, and she knows, instinctively that it's not a _knockoff._ That Richard Castle would _certainly_ not have settled for a recently manufactured knockoff.

She can't believe it, but eBay and Google and a dozen honest-to-God fan sites all tell the same story. They list the names of the rich and not-so-rich and famous who've favored it, and God help her, his name shows up under Favored By _and_ In Search Of, and she can't believe it. She's managed to steal a $100 pencil from him.

* * *

 

She vows to give it back. She imagines a hundred different scenarios. Quietly dropping it back into the cup and letting him wonder. Pushing it across the table when she goes all in at one of his poker games. Casually handing it back and dropping it into the messenger bag he carries sometimes.

She imagines a hundred different ways she undo her crime, but she doesn't act on any of them. And she uses it. She keeps in a drawer at home and finds herself using it. For the Saturday crossword. When the urge to sketch strikes her. To make her grocery lists when she's irritated with him.

She uses it, even though she has every intention of giving it back. She uses it, even though it gives her a heart attack every time she sharpens it, now that she knows what it costs. Now that she can do back-of-the-envelope math on the shavings she tips into her desk-side waste basket at him.

She uses it, all the while assuming that she'll give it back eventually. That some moment will present itself sooner or later.

It never occurs to her that she won't give it back until he betrays her. Until he tries to make her sit in a hospital corridor, like she's some fucking child.

But summer comes, and he does betray her. He tries to make her sit while he breaks the news, and she backs away. She flees on foot and tells herself she's going to snap it half. That she's going to burn the fucking thing and send him the ashes. The crimped ferrule and the charred eraser with no explanation. She tells herself she's damned well going to, but she doesn't.

She brings it to the precinct. She shoves it in her desk there. In the way back of her deepest desk drawer and forgets about it. She pretends to forget about it. 

* * *

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rook uses Blackwing 602s in the Nikki Heat books. They’re beautiful, sought-after pencils, and even though a new company is producing them now, people will still pay big bucks for originals.


	29. Interruptus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “He takes a turn for the weird near the end of Tiffany Shaw’s interrogation. Weird, even for him.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A superdumb insert for Death Gone Crazy (5 x 12).

 

* * *

 

He takes a turn for the weird near the end of Tiffany Shaw’s interrogation. Weird, even for him.

She’s trying to stitch together all these pieces. The body guard’s half truths, and now way too many whole truths from Tiffany Shaw.

“You ever do it in a nightclub, Detective? Hot, sweaty, quick?”

She can practically hear him smirking. Can practically see him flipping through his mental rolodex of juvenile comments, but their soft-core porn star jerks her attention right back to center with a plot twist that brings thing all the way around to the body guard again.

“I thought it was another woman, so I followed him to see who it was. But when I saw what that bodyguard was up to . . . “

That’s when the weird really kicks in. His whole body tenses. He lights up like a freaking Christmas tree, and the look he lays on her is . . . a problem. It turns her head, literally. She doesn’t have the slightest intention of acknowledging it. Him. Whatever’s going on. Not the slightest intention, but it turns her head.  

It’s absolutely fucking smoldering. It’s the least workplace-appropriate look he’s given her in the last seven months. Hell, it’s the least workplace-appropriate look he’s given her since he offered to let her spank him in this very room, and . . . whoa.

She breathes in. Breathes out, and turns her attention back to Tiffany Shaw, because that particular memory isn’t exactly good for professionalism. She shifts in her seat. Inches her chair every so slightly away from him, and treats him to the withering side-eye glare that usually does the trick. It usually snaps him right back in line, but not this time. Not this time at all.

He faces Tiffany Shaw again. He’s all eyes front—all innocence, except for the fact that his thigh is suddenly pressed right up against hers under the shitty table. Except for the fact that his hand is on her knee and trailing steadily upward.  

“What was she up to?” he asks, his voice smooth and even. Pitched entirely too low for anywhere but the bedroom, and she’s really going to kill him the absolute first chance she gets.

“Nothing good . . .” Tiffany says. She flashes them her phone. The picture of Scarlett Jones, and the wheels start to turn in Kate’s head. They’re _trying t_ o turn, but he yanks her out of her chair. He practically carries her out of the interrogation room even as she’s checking to be sure the pictures made it to her phone.  

"Castle," she hisses as his hand lands on her hip. As his arm curves around her waist and molds her to his side, dragging her down the hall, decidedly away from the bullpen. Decidedly away from Ryan who, hopefully, has news about Scarlett Jones’ alibi. “What is _with_ you?”

“With _me?”_ He spins her suddenly. He backs her against a wall in a particularly shadowy corner. “My very dear Detective Beckett,” he murmurs right against her ear, “it’s not about what’s with me.”

“Then what . . .” she snaps. She means to snap, but he’s distracting. His eyes are roaming over her, head to toe. He’s crackling with desire, with smug amusement, like he knows something she doesn’t. Like he’s waiting for her to catch up, and . . . “Castle, we are _at work.”_

“We are.” He blinks. A huge, genuine Tex Avery–worthy blink, like he’s just realized it. Like whatever the hell is going on with him, he’s managed to forget that tiny detail and remembering turns it up a notch. He crowds against her. “You. And I.” His teeth catch her ear lobe. “Are on the job.”

She pushes him away. She plants her palms against his chest and pushes him away. Except that she doesn’t do that at all. Except that both hands are curled tight in his shirt, and her head is tipping far to the side. “Castle—“

“We’re on the job.” He tugs at the top button of her blouse. He thumbs it open and hauls the collar aside. He nips hard at the just-revealed skin, groaning as her back arches and her hips press into his. “And Esposito . . .”

His mouth opens, hot and wet against the tense cord of muscle in her neck. The heel of his hand brushes her breast. The electric contact nearly sends her through the roof. It sends desire and sudden clarity sizzling through her.

“Esposito’s on a date.” She grabs a fistful of his hair. Their eyes meet in a burning look. She yanks his mouth up to hers. “With Scarlett Jones.”

“Not for long.” A dark laugh rumbles through his chest. He finds the hem of her blouse. He slides  his palm up her side. He teases her ribs and the lace edge of her bra. “How far . . . How far do you think they’ve . . . ”

His breath hitches. He gasps as she hip checks him and turns the tables. She pins him to the wall and shuts him up with a searing kiss.

“Just far enough.”

She pushes off the wall. She turns on her heel, and she’s halfway down the hall before he even registers it. Before he’s even breathing again.

“Where . . .” His hands scrub over his face. He tugs at his belt. At the bottom edge of his sport coat. He takes a shaky step toward her. “Beckett, where are you going?”

“To bring in Scarlett Jones,” she throws an arch glance over her shoulder, “Obviously.”

“What? Now?” His voice runs through at least an octave. “Not . . . later.”

“Now.” She picks up the pace. “Not later.”

“But we . . .” He scurries to catch up. Reaches out to haul her back into the shadows.  “We have to go now?”

“Not we.” She stops abruptly. She turns and straight-arms him. “You’re not coming. Not until I get home.”

She waits for that to hit him. All possible interpretations of _that_ to hit him, then strides off.

“Details,” he calls after her. “I am expecting details, Beckett.” 

* * *

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A much-deserved cockblock for a certain Hispanic detective, 5 years in the making . . .


	30. In Winter, Enjoy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The first chill rolls in late that year. After her birthday. After Thanksgiving, even.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Future fic for the last day of this month.

 

In seed time learn,

in harvest teach,

in winter enjoy.   
  


— William Blake

* * *

 

The first chill rolls in late that year. After her birthday. After Thanksgiving, even, and they'd scrapped their plans to go skating over the long weekend. 

"Too warm," he'd said, shaking his head. "And all my cargo shorts and Hawaiian shirts are already packed away for the season." 

"You should get them out," she'd answered, matching his playful tone. Faking it a little, because he means well. Because he's careful with her this time of year and she wants him to know she's ok, mostly. Mostly, the good has crept in and the bad has faded away. That’s mostly how it is, so she'd crept up behind him in the full-length mirror and popped up over his shoulder to stare him down. "We'll have a bonfire when it finally gets cold." 

He'd laughed. He'd turned around and wrapped her up in a bear hug. Pretended to be wounded that she thinks there are cargo shorts lurking somewhere in his wardrobe. She'd played along, she'd let him make her laugh, but they'd scrapped their plans for Rockefeller Center. 

And then the chill rolls in, sudden and fierce, as though the year's just remembered itself. As if November's just remembered it has a job to do, and she makes up her mind. 

"I want to do it this year." She's on the threshold of the twins' room. She's clinging to the door frame like she might flee if she doesn't. She might flee. 

"Do it?" He's genuinely confused at first. Caught up in the mostly futile task of trying to impose some order on the space while the boys sleep. But he turns. He reads her body by the hallway light blazing in behind her. He studies her, at a loss for a moment. Undecided for a moment, but then he advances, his voice low and rumbling. Playful, with a question threaded all through it. "All year, Captain? _All_ year? I certainly love a challenge . . ." 

He wraps her up. He crowds her into the hallway, pulling the door silently shut behind him. He tugs her toward the stairs, stringing theatrical kisses all down the column of her throat. He makes her laugh. Makes her throw her arms around his neck, because she's grateful for him. Grateful for the light touch he has that’s such a gift this time of year. 

"Castle." She pulls against him at the bottom of the stairs. She lets her arms and his arms go taut and looks him in the eye. "My dad still has everything." She pauses. Falters for a terrible minute, because . . . maybe he doesn't. It's been years. _So_ many years, and maybe her dad doesn't still have everything. 

"Everything?" 

He takes a step toward her. Strokes the hair back from her face and waits it out with her. The terrible moment he doesn't know the half of, and she soldiers on. 

"I think he still has it. All the Christmas stuff. I want to go through it." 

She draws in a deep breath. Looks around at the chaos-in-progress that is the living room. The kitchen. The whole first floor, because it turns out that Christmas on the Castle scale is _hard_ with their _I-can-do-it-myself_ eldest and two dangerously ambulatory little savages under foot. 

"I'd like to have it." She thinks of her dad's place. Tidy and warmer than it used to be. Homier with Lily’s endless art work sitting in frames all around. With family portraits and snapshots everywhere. Homier than it used to be, but unchanging, season to season, and the two of them should talk about it. They should at least talk about it. ”I’d like to go through it with him, and maybe bring some . . .?" 

"Some. All. None." He presses a kiss to her forehead. He slides an arm around her waist and gestures to the chaos-in-progress. "We've got room for that."

 

 

* * *

 

"However you want to do it," he tells her. He's been telling her for days, about to tip over into a week. "I can be there." He catches Jake as he dashes by, which means Reese is scaling his legs, wailing at the top of his lungs in a matter of seconds, while Lily stands by, hands on hips, ready to scold. " _We_ can be there or not." 

"Be where?" Lily asks. 

She's asked over and over, and he every time, he distracts her with jokes. With riddles and word play. _Beware of dog. Beware! Here be monsters!_ He neatly shunts her agile, curious little mind into some other groove and leaves the question wide open. 

 _However you want to do it_. 

But the thing is, she doesn't know. The decision itself—saying it out loud—feels so monumental that the mechanics are entirely overwhelming. And still, she wants to do it. Still, she feels a little frantic when it's another day and another and now almost a week.

She feels a little frantic when she crawls into bed ridiculously early with November ending. With December careening toward her, and he crawls in with her. 

“Hey,” she grumbles as he manhandles her. As he redistributes the out of control pile of blankets they have going and shoves his freezing cold nose right into her collarbone. _“Hey!”_  

“Hey.” There’s weight to the simple syllable. In the way he fits her body against his, back to front, and feathers a kiss behind her ear. “There’s . . . a development with the tall one.” 

“A development.” She feels a trickle of alarm. She tries to turn to face him, but he holds her fast. 

“Not bad,” he says quickly. Apologetically. “Not a bad development. But you know her ornaments . . .” 

“Ornaments.” She smiles. Imagines tinsel spills and glue accidents and total depletion of the household supply of macaroni. She imagines the dining room table that cost God knows how much irrevocably ruined, all in the service of ornaments, each one with a name in wobbly letters. Lily’s been agonizing over for days. For weeks. Since Halloween, really. “What, she thought of another fifty people who need them?” 

“Just one. She asked for help spelling it.” She feels his brow furrow against her cheek. Feels his lungs fill and his palm fanning out over her hip as he steels himself. “Nonna Johanna.” 

“Oh.” She goes still inside. She waits for something. Panic. Sorrow. Something, but it’s not forthcoming. “Oh,” she says again. 

“She thought Grandpa Jim would like it.” He’s smiling and frowning at the same time. She hears it. Hears the little cracks it opens up in his heart and her and her own. “We’re out of glue—again—but I didn’t want you to be blindsided . . .” 

“I want to take her. Tomorrow.”  She squirms on to her back. She kicks at the blankets and pushes at the heavy arm around her waist until she’s facing him. “Can you keep the beasts? I want her and my dad and I—“

“Take her. Tomorrow.” He cuts her off with a kiss. With a smile and a satisfied laugh. “I can keep the beasts.” 

 

* * *

 

“It’s beautiful, sweetheart.” Her dad beams. He rests his chin on Lily’s shoulder as he holds it up and the two of them admire it as it spins from its silver ribbon. 

“Tinsel, Grandpa.” Lily reaches up to fan the trailing sparks of red and green and gold with her fingers. “Tinsel _so_ pretty.” 

“You’ll have to help me hang some, then.” He meets Kate’s eyes and nods to the side. To a huge, open carton. “What colors do you think your dad sent, Lily?” 

“Castle?” 

She’s flustered. Prepared to be mortified. To apologize, but her dad gives a mild shake of his head. 

“He asked if I would mind a couple of helpers,” he says. He turns Lily on his lap. “And here you are.” 

“We’re good helpers,” Lily tells him. “Mama didn’t _even_ need Daddy to lift her up for the angel on the way up on the tree. It _very_ high and Mama didn’t even need Daddy to lift her up.” 

“No, Mama didn’t,” she laughs. She laughs all the way from her belly. All the way to the tips of her toes. “But Daddy tried, didn’t he?” 

Lily leans right into him says in a stage whisper, “Mama pinch his _ear.”_

“Well, that’s not a very good example, is it?” He whispers back, just as theatrically. “Your Nonna and I taught her better than that.” 

“Not good example, Mama,” she echoes with a stern frown. 

“I guess I don’t get to hang the first ornament, then.” 

Kate hangs her head, mostly to hide her smile as her dad gathers Lily up. As he makes a production of it, pretending that she’s nearly too big for him to lift. Mostly pretending. Her bright green shoes dangle almost to his knees as he lifts her to loop the silver ribbon over the corner of a silver-framed photo of her mother that she barely remembers. 

  
“New?” Kate asks, stepping up to lay a hand on her father’s back. 

“Old,” he says gruffly. “Polished it up and thought it should be out here. Not just tucked away in the office.” He shifts Lily on his hip. He reaches out to trail a finger over the frame’s shining scrollwork design. “Thought you girls could help me do it up right.” 

 

* * *

 

Lily is fascinated by the attic. 

“Where the secret stairs at our house, Mama?” She drags her finger over the heavy, groaning spring where they pull down from the ceiling. “We have secret stairs?” 

“No secret stairs, at our house Baby.” Kate climbs behind her daughter, trying not to hover. Trying not to feel like she’s bracing herself, but she’s wavering. For the first time since decision settled something deep within her, but Lily runs ahead. “Lil, you’ve gotta wait . . .” 

“Wait!” Her dad laughs. A full, hearty chuckle, and he’s utterly undaunted by the glare she shoots down at him where he stands at the base of the rickety glorified ladder. “Good luck with that, Katie.”

There’s more than she remembers, and less. Just a handful of the fragile glass balls in jewel tones, though she’d have sworn there were dozens. She’d have sworn it took an age every year to find new hooks and bend them just so until her mother was satisfied they wouldn’t go crashing to the hardwood floor the first time someone slammed the front door. 

More—far more—things made with her own hands. School pictures cut out with pinking sheers and glued on to lumpy ceramic backings. Pictures of the three of them. Her mom, her dad, and her, grinning at the camera. Her share of tinsel and macaroni and glitter glue. 

“Bigger or littler?” Lily presents them, one by one, and Kate tries to remember. “Bigger or littler than me, Mama?” 

“Bigger.” She drags her finger along the rustic wooden edge. Along the grooves of the crude, sepia-toned outlines of stars and childish zigzag Christmas trees. “You see this? We burned the edges with a very hot metal  . . . thing.” 

She frowns. Has no idea what the word is for it, though she remembers the art class vividly. Remembers the careful reverence she’d worked with. 

“You _burned_ it.” Lily is in awe. “How much bigger, Mama?” 

“Lots,” she says quickly. “Lots, _lots_ bigger.” Eager to divert her attention, she kneels up and pops open another tub. “Oh, Lil, look at these!” She scoops up a handful of tiny, delicate shapes. They’re stockings and winter caps and ice skates. They’re hand knits and needlepointed little pillows. “I can’t remember if Nonna made these—“ 

“Bibi.” Her father’s voice comes to them from the top of the stairs, his head just visible. “Your Mama’s grandma on my side, Lily. Your phone, Katie.”

He hands it over. There’s a text from Castle. From all three boys, actually, with their faces pressed in so close to the camera that they fill the frame. _Checking in,_ it says, followed by a string of Christmas emojis that goes on for days. Jake and Reese and Jake again, no doubt.  

She misses him. Suddenly, fiercely she misses all of them. 

“Hey Lil, should we call Daddy and the boys?” She reaches for the girl, but Lily pulls sharply away. 

“I wanna see the Bibi things.” She leans way over the tub, practically tumbling over the side. “The little things! I wanna _see,_ Mama!”

 “There’s a little box inside there, sweetheart.” Her dad comes to the rescue. He climbs the last few steps and hunkers down at Lily’s side. “How about we bring these downstairs and you can decide which ones should live with me and which ones should live with you.” 

“With _me_?” Lily breathes. “Mama these live with _me_?” 

“Some,” Kate says, as sternly as she can with her heart bursting. “Grandpa Jim needs some for his house.” 

“I have the stocking, Grandpa. And you have this. What this called?” 

Lily prattles all the way down the stairs. All the way down the hall and into the living room. She listens. She sits cross-legged wth the phone in her lap, side by side with an ornament featuring the three of them, framed in red and green foil paper. She listens to the music of her daughter’s voice. The low, easy cadence of her fathers’. She listens for a long moment, then dials. 

She hears the twins first. Lusty yells, before he can even say anything. “Hitting the eject button?”

“Me?” he scoffs. “Never give up, never surrender.” 

“We miss you.” She toys with the blunted edge of the ornament. She tips her head toward the stairs to listen. “I miss you. Lily is too busy grilling my dad.” 

“Miss you, too,” he says softly. Fondly, though the effect is ruined by a shriek from one twin followed hard on by the other, not to be outdone. “All of us, obviously.” 

“You should be here.” It spills out of her mouth. An urgent truth. “Can you bring them here? I know the drive . . . ” she looks at her watch. “The drive would suck right now.” 

She deflates. Feels the silvery goodness that’s buoyed her up all day tarnish a little. 

“Really?” He laughs. 

She hears a shift in the quality of sound on his end, like he’s going from in to out. She hears the solid thunk of a door slamming, and it’s strange. It’s very strange, and she’s on her feet. She’s clambering down the rickety, glorified ladder. She reaches the hall just as the bell rings. Just as her dad, with Lily at his side gives her a sly look and opens the front door. 

“You sure?” Castle says into his headphones. Into her ear and into the brisk winter air sweeping in behind him. 

“I’m sure.” She shoves the phone into her pocket. She snatches Jake from his hip and runs her fingers through Reese’s hair as he presses his face to her thigh. She leans up and kisses him. “I’m _so_ sure.” 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to those who have read and commented and tweeted and reblogged. This was challenging. I absolutely didn’t have time to do this, and yet I’m glad that I did as I turn the corner out of this year and out of a major part of my life. Heartfelt thanks.  


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